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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. Copyright No.. 

Shell........... 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 








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GOD IS LOVE 



BY 



G. E FIPIELD 



•■ For God so loved the world that he gave his only 
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should 
not perish, but have everlasting life.' 1 — John 3:16. 



%W<jC^I 



. . . TTbeo&ore iReese . . ' 

155 LaSalle Street. 

Chicago. 
publisher of Evangelical xiterature. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1897, by 

GEORGE E. FIFIELD, 

In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at 
Washington, D. C. 



DEDICATION. 



To the friends whose love and trust have 
gladdened and glorified his days; and to the 
many kindred hearts, who, though yet un- 
known, are still, through kindred experiences, 
being led along the converging paths that 
center at the throne, to blend their lives for- 
ever in the glory and joy of immortal friend- 
ship, this little book is affectionately dedicated 

by the AUTHOR. 

January 1, 1897. 



Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay 
down his life for his friends." — Jesus, 



PEEFACE. 



These chapters first appeared some four 
years since, published as a serial in one of 
our weekly religious journals. Since that 
time, the writer has never ceased to receive 
requests that they be put in some more perma^ 
nent form. This little book is the result. The 
author is very sensible of its imperfections and 
limitations. 

Of the many subjects touched, not one is 
treated exhaustively, but all are only used for 
the moment, as God uses the sunset clouds, or 
the snow on the mountain's summit, merely to 
reflect to darkened eyes, low down in the valley, 
the glory of his goodness. 

Born of the heart, it is humbly hoped these 
words may speak to the heart ; and that some 
poor souls, driven by doubt and wandering 
wearily because of sin, may behold here re- 
vealed the mystic .ladder leading from the 
Bethel stone of their present hunger and 
loneliness to the light and w T armth and plenty 
of the Father's House. 

G. E. F. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 
Knowing God, ---9 

CHAPTER II. 
The Attributes of God, ----- 15 

CHAPTER III. 
Love the Source of Righteousness, - 22 

CHAPTER IV. 
Satan's Effort to Hide God's Love, - - 29 

CHAPTER V. 
The Fatherhood of God, 38 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Glory of God, 4=5 

CHAPTER VII. 
The Unity of the Law and the Gospel, - - 53 

CHAPTER VIII. 
The Nature of the Divine Government, - 59 

CHAPTER IX. 
The Law of Love, 67 

CHAPTER X. 
The Two Ways, 75 

CHAPTER XI. 
The Design of the Law, 82 



Page. 

CHAPTER XII. 

How Man Misunderstood His Maker, - - 91 

CHAPTER XIII. 
The Atonement, 100 

CHAPTER XIV. 
The Atonement Vicarious, .... no 

CHAPTER XV. 
Miracles and their Meaning, - - - - 120 

CHAPTER XVI. 
The Sacrifice of Christ Honors God's Law, - 129 

CHAPTER XVII. 
God's Dealing with the Wicked, ... 139 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
Why Has Sin Been Permitted so Long ? - 149 

CHAPTER XIX. 
Will there Be Gain ? 158 

CHAPTER XX. 
The Closing of Probation, .... 169 

CHAPTER XXI. 
"His Strange Act," ...... iso 

CHAPTER XXII. 

The Plagues of Egypt, 186 

CHAPTER XXIII. 
The Seven Last Plagues, 196 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

The Second Resurrection, - - - 210 



GOD IS LOVE. 



CHAPTER I. 



KNOWING GOD. 

"He that loveth not knoweth not God. for God is love."— 1 John 4 : 8. 

' ' God is love. ' ' These three words of only 
nine letters contain a revelation of God greater 
than men or angels will ever be able fully to 
fathom. In fact, to know more of their mean- 
ing, to be constantly learning more of their 
meaning, will be the work and the wisdom, the 
pleasure and the poetry, of the redeemed 
throughout eternity. To comprehend the 
meaning of these words is to know God and 
Jesus Christ, and to know these is life eternal. 1 
In truth, there is no knowledge outside of 
them ; for in them are hid all the treasures of 
wisdom and knowledge, and without is only 
ignorance and darkness. 2 

This is no figure of speech, it is the simple 
statement of a fact. To say that any man has 
had a thought of truth or an item of knowledge 
that God did not have before him, is to say 
that in that respect the man is in advance of 
his Maker; and that would be to deny the om- 
niscience of God. Although they cannot lead 

[9] 



10 GOD IS LOVE. 

to wicked actions in him as they do in us, yet 
even our wicked thoughts are known to God 
before we think them. The psalmist says : 
"O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known 
me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine 
uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. ' ' 3 
And Job answered the Lord and said, " I know 
that thou canst do everything, and that no 
thought can be toithholden from thee."* David is 
yet more bold, for he says, " The Lord searcheth 
all hearts and understandeth all the imagina- 
tions of the thoughts" 

No wonder that grand old Kepler, as he 
gazed into the heavens, computing and meas- 
uring the motions of the planets, till, one after 
another, the sublime laws of planetary motion 
burst upon his bewildered mind, — no wonder 
that, with brimming eyes and throbbing heart, 
he exclaimed, "O God, I think thy thoughts 
after thee ! ' ' The best that any astronomer 
can do is to think reverently God's thoughts 
after him, and perchance trace the working 
out of some of those thoughts through the 
wondrous star-gemmed pathways of the sky. 
All the student of zoology can do is to trace 
the thoughts of God through the varied forms 
of animal life, discovering at every step the 
evidences of the infinite Mind that has pre- 
ceded him. 

The botanist traces the same Mind through 
the orders and families of the vegetable king- 
dom, finding in every leaf and every flower 



KNOWING GOD. 11 

an infinity of beauty revealed, which, even with 
the aid of all his microscopes, he cannot com- 
prehend ; and yet he knows and feels that the 
infinite Mind has thought it all out before 
him, and that every thought was a thought 
of love. The very buds on the trees grow in 
accordance with a mathematical law, and he 
sees that God had numbered them all before 
they came. 

Faith sees but a short step from all this to 
the truth that Jesus taught when he said : ' ' The 
very hairs of your head are all numbered. 
Fear ye not, therefore. ' ' What wonder that 
David said : ' ' Thou, Lord, hast made me glad 
through thy work ; I will triumph in the 
works of thy hands. O Lord, how great 
are thy works ! and thy thoughts are very 
deep. ' ' From the mightiest sun that swings 
in space to the smallest flower blooming at 
my feet, there is an infinity in everything ; 
and if we read aright, we soon discover it to 
be an infinity of all-comprehending and all- 
encompassing love, for God is love. Thus 
we think God's thoughts after him, till our 
own hearts are filled with love ineffable. 

The poet's soul never thrilled with a pure 
emotion but he caught the thought from God, 
revealed somewhere in his work or his word. 
The mighty harmony whose first full pulse 
almost burst the enraptured musician's heart, 
descended through dim distances from the an- 
gel choir ; his sensitive ear only caught and 



12 GOD IS LOVE. 

reproduced it here. So all study is the 
study of God, all knowledge is included in 
knowing him, and to know him is to know 
love, for "God is love." 

The visitor in Washington, looking from the 
dome of the capitol, discovers that all streets 
lead toward him. The capitol is the hub from 
which all the streets radiate to the city and 
to the nation. In the great empire of Rome, 
it was said all roads led to Rome. So God 
sits in the center of his mighty universe, and 
every path of knowledge is a magnificent 
avenue leading to his throne, an avenue on 
which he who walks does well to pause, and 
wonder, and worship at every object passed, 
even as the ancient traveler at the wayside 
shrine, wondering and worshiping, seeing God 
in everything, only taking care to keep his 
face onward toward the throne and to be pre- 
pared for greater glory farther on. 

The pantheist and the agnostic champion of 
a science falsely so called, may walk backward 
admiring the pebbles by the way, and persist- 
ently refuse to see anything but what they 
have already passed ; but faith chooses rather 
to leave those things which are behind, and 
press forward to those things which are be- 
fore, beholding each new object, and the whole 
avenue before, in the magnificent light of the 
throne. "To such a one," Carlisle well says, 
"the universe is not a kitchen and a cattle 
stall merely, but an oracle and a temple as 



KNOWING GOD. 13 

well. ' ' For him the mystery does not vanish 
with the superficial explanations of science, 
but through these he sees all mysteries broad- 
ening and deepening, and resolving themselves 
into the one great sweet mystery of God, — 
and God is love. It is not strange that this 
should be so. It is like God, a God who 
would lead all men to him, if only they would 
be led. 

We see the same thing in his word as in his 
work. The first commandment includes the 
whole decalogue ; the message of the first an- 
gel of Revelation 14 includes all three mes- 
sages ; the first sermon of Christ includes the 
whole gospel. Why ? Because God would ar- 
range it so that the logical mind, receiving 
the first glimmerings of truth, might be led 
thereby step by step into the whole truth, 
and to himself the God of truth. This is be- 
cause God is love. Even so in his work : if 
we but trace his thought, we shall find from 
the smallest insect, studied only under the 
most powerful magnifying glass, up to the 
largest *suns and worlds, stepping-stones up- 
ward, yea, a magnificent stairway leading to 
him. 

This is what Paul meant when he says : 
' ' The invisible things of him from the creation 
of the world are clearly seen, being under- 
stood by the things that are made, even his 
eternal power and Godhead ; so that they [the 
heathen] are without excuse. ' ' And David tells 



14 GOD IS LOVE. 

the same truth: "The heavens declare the 
glory of God, and the firmament showeth his 
handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, 
and night unto night showeth knowledge. 
There is no speech nor language, where their 
voice is not heard. ' ' 5 All knowledge is in him, 
so night unto night reveals him. His glory 
is his goodness. So the heavens declare his 
goodness ; and for him who has eyes to see, 
and ears to hear, and a heart to understand, 
the heavens and earth, day and night, unite 
in varied harmonious voices, to proclaim in 
every land and every tongue that God is love. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 



" I know not where his islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air. 
I only know I cannot drift 

Beyond his love and care." — W hitfier. 

"God is love." The study of these words 
is the study of a God in whom are hid all 
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. God 
has revealed himself both in his work and in 
his word, and these revelations agree in this 
truth. All that the broadest science can do is 
to comprehend something of the plan of crea- 
tion, and this whole creation is but the ma- 
terialization of the divine thought. The plan 
is God's — a part of the infinite Mind. 

What the word of God seeks to do is to re- 
veal in human language the divine plan of 
redemption, a plan disclosing such infinite 
depths of love that even the angels desire to 
look into it. Even they who constantly dwell 
in the full light of that love, unclouded by 
sin or sorrow, — even they behold here un- 
known expanses and unf athomed depths ; and 
if asked what they most thought revealed the 
love of God for his creatures, they would un- 

[15] 



16 GOD IS LOVE. 



doubtedly answer, "God so loved the world 
that he gave his only begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth in him should not per- 
ish, but have everlasting life." 

''God is love." What do the words mean' 
What can they mean but that love is the con- 
trolling characteristic in the mind of God the 
one attribute of Deity from which all other 
attributes spring, and back into which they 
can all be traced ? The Scriptures do not say 
that God is power; they say he is powerful 
almighty. We see his power manifested in 
creating and upholding the universe; but his 
power separated from his love would but re- 
veal to him our weakness until we became 
contemptible in his sight. The two must not 
be separated. 

What the soul, wearied with its own hope- 
less struggle against sin, needs to see, is not 
that he is less powerful, but that his power is 
his love. What is the moral power of the uni- 
verse but the power of love ? Said Napoleon 
while languishing in exile on the barren rock 
of St. Helena, "Alexander, Julius Ccesar, and 
myself founded kingdoms by the power of 
our arms, and to-day who cares for us ? But 
Jesus Christ founded a kingdom by the power 
of his love, and to-day millions would die for 
him." 

Satan has no power to force a man arbitra- 
rily to do wrong. If he did have that power, 
the wrong would be solely in him, and not in 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 17 

the man thus forced. All evil, as all good, 
lies in the mind that directs the action. If 
by taking hold of one who is weaker than I 
am, I force him to thrust a dagger into his 
neighbor, it was my mind, not his, that di- 
rected the blow, and in me solely lies the 
sin. If he consents to my act, he becomes 
partner in the guilt. If I could force his 
mind on every subject by thus putting my 
mind in the place of his own, he would cease 
to have any separate existence from me, and 
hence would have no character, either good or 
bad. So God cannot force the mind arbitra- 
rily to dictate good actions. To do that would 
be to destroy individual identity, and make 
all men but machines to manifest God's mind. 
The power of Satan is therefore solely the 
power to lead men who submit their minds to 
him, into evil. And the power of God to re- 
deem the world is solely the power of his love 
to lead men who submit their minds to him, 
into righteousness. God's power is therefore 
his love. Nor can this be limited to mere 
moral power. What is the power that created 
and that upholds the universe? Agnostic 
science may prate learnedly of evolution and 
gravitation, but faith sees the same infinite 
Love, without whom not a sparrow f alleth to 
the ground, creating and upholding suns and 
worlds, that there may be light, and heat, and 
home for all his creatures. Thus the power 
of God is his love, and why need we fear? 

2 



18 GOD IS LOVE. 

Perfect love casteth out fear by revealing the 
fact that the infinite reservoir of almighty 
force is held at the dictation of that love that 
gathereth the lambs in his arms, and tenderly 
carrieth them in his bosom. 

And what about the wisdom of God? We 
see his wonderful wisdom revealed in the 
harmonious revolution of the planets in their 
orbits, each with clocklike precision complet- 
ing its revolution at just the right time, though 
hundreds of years in making it; all crossing 
and recrossing one another's paths in the 
heavens, yet never dashing into each other. 
This reveals his wisdom, and also his love 
for his creatures, if we look with other than 
blind eyes. His wisdom separated from his 
love would but teach him our weakness and 
foolishness. 

Shut in behind the impenetrable future, and 
peering with but faulty vision into the poorly 
comprehended past, what the soul, thus pain- 
fully conscious of its own limitations, wants 
to know is that God's wisdom is his love, and 
that all the future, to it so dark, is held in 
Love's hands. 

After all, what is the world's foolishness 
but its rebellion against the wisdom of God's 
law, which is love ? — a rebellion and a fool- 
ishness which have given birth to every throb 
of human pain and every wail of human an- 
guish. Eternity will demonstrate that the 
wisdom of God was but the wisdom of a 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 19 

fatherly, solicitous love, that saw the inevit- 
able end of each course of action from the 
beginning, and only forbade those things 
which would lead to misery. 

And what is justice, the justice of God, but 
another name for his love ? Our partial love 
may make us unjust. If I love A more than 
B, I may be unjust to B, but this injustice 
is not the result of my love for A, but rather 
of the imperfection of my love in its lack to- 
ward B. The moment we conceive of a love 
that is infinite and all-embracing, that moment 
we see that that love includes justice. Can 
he who loves all his children be unjust to any 
of them? Thus justice is love, and he, the 
dread One, holding the balances in his hands, 
is he beyond whose love and care we cannot 
stray, though we may often grieve his Spirit. 

And what shall I say of the wrath of God, 
spoken of so many times in the Scripture ? 
Jesus Christ came to reveal the Father. There 
never was a being on this earth who loved 
the sinner as did he, and never one who so 
perfectly and completely hated the sin. His 
love for the sinner was as infinite as his 
hatred for the sin. In him is revealed a God 
who ever and always completely separates be- 
tween the sinner and the sin. He hates the 
sin, because it is the enemy of the sinner, 
whom he loves. If I have a friend, and know 
of an assassin who is lurking for his life, the 



20 GOD IS LOVE. 

measure of my love for that friend is the 
measure of my hatred for that assassin. 

Sin is the only enemy of the human race. 
It lurks insidiously behind ten thousand beau- 
tiful forms of pleasure, and ever lurks with 
murderous intent. All God's hatred is his 
hatred for sin. All his wrath is his wrath 
against sin. This hatred and wrath are sim- 
ply his love for the sinner, whom sin is seek- 
ing to destroy. The plan of redemption is 
God's effort, by revealing his infinite love, to 
separate the sin from the sinner, so that sin 
may be destroyed, misery banished, and the 
universe clean, and yet the sinner saved. 

Only those who finally and inseparably con- 
nect themselves with sin, so that God cannot 
destroy the one without destroying the other, 
will have to drink God's wrath against sin. 
Love takes no pleasure in this even. "As I 
live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure 
in the death of the wicked ; but that the 
wicked turn from his way and live; turn ye, 
turn ye from your evil ways ; for why will 
ye die?" 

Thus all the attributes of God are traced 
back to the one attribute, and "God is love." 
' ' Love is of God ; and every one that loveth 
is born of God, and knoweth God. He that 
loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. ' ' 
There is nothing in God but love, for love 
includes everything good. His love reaches 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 21 

to the outermost rim of his mighty universe, 
and takes in its constant care all his creatures, 
never leaving them for a moment, however 
much they may grieve him to his heart. 



CHAPTER III. 



LOVE THE SOURCE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



"All thy commandments are righteousness."— David. 
"Love is the fulfilling of the law."— Paul. 

Love is the one attribute of God, from which 
all other attributes spring, — the all in a]l of 
God; and therefore the past, with its faults 
and failures, and the future, with its fears, if 
we but trust him, rest safely in Love's 
hands. But, says one, why is it so important 
to know this ? 

To say nothing of the unspeakable joy of 
this knowledge, all the power of the gospel 
of Christ to transform the soul and work in 
us the works of righteousness, depends upon 
it. All the righteousness of God is summed 
up in the ten commandments, wherefore David 
says : " The law of the Lord is perfect ;" and, 
"all thy commandments are righteousness." 
God says, ' ' Hearken unto me, ye that know 
righteousness, the people in whose heart is 
my law." Thus it is seen that to have the 
righteousness of God in the heart is simply 
to have the law of God written there. Jesus 
sums up all the law, and consequently the 

[22] 



LOVE THE SOURCE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 23 

whole moral duty of man, in the two princi- 
ples of love to God and love to man. John 
reduces these principles to the one principle 
of love to God, by showing that if we love 
God, the Father, we will love man, his child, 
our brother. 1 So Paul sums up the whole 
duty of man and all the righteousness of God 
in one word, saying ".Love is the fulfilling of 
the law," and John assents to this propo- 
sition by saying, "Whoso keepeth his word, 
in him verily is the love of God perfected." 
Thus love dwelling in the heart of man is the 
fulfilling of all righteousness, and hatred 
dwelling there is the fulfilling of all iniquity, 
and all the conflict of the ages is simply the 
conflict of these two principles in the hearts 
of God's creatures. 

But what is to change our hearts, that are 
so full of hatred, into hearts that are filled 
only with love ? What is the source of all 
this love? John answers by saying, "Love 
is of God; and every one that loveth is born 
of God." Ah, that is it; like begets like, — the 
mighty, constant, all - encompassing love of 
God, that upholds us, and enfolds us, and 
wraps us in with him, begets a like love in 
our hearts, leading us to reach out helpful 
hands in pitying, sympathetic love to all his 
creatures ! And this is righteousness, the 
righteousness of God, and nothing else is 
righteousness. 

Suppose it were possible for a man to do 



24 GOD IS LOVE. 

right simply that he might gain heaven. That 
very desire cherished persistently and thought- 
lessly, when so many others are going down 
to death, would itself be selfishness and sin. 
Jesus Christ gave up heaven, accounting it 
not a thing to be held fast when man was 
lost. 2 Suppose it were possible that one should 
do right for fear of hell ; that at best would be 
a species of cowardice, that dare not go where 
it believed so many others were going. All 
this would be but an external righteousness, 
a making clean the outside of the cup and the 
platter. The real principle of righteousness, 
which is love itself, would be lacking, and so 
there would be none of God's righteousness, 
but only self-righteousness, which is as filthy 
rags in his sight. There is truth and beauty 
in the old legend of an angel with a watering 
pot in one hand and a censor in the other, 
pouring water on the flames of hell, and 
causing the smoke to rise and obscure the 
glory of heaven, that men might do right 
simply for the love of right. 

Let it be remembered that love of right and 
love of God are one and the same, for in the 
conception of all true men God is the embodi- 
ment of the supremely right, the supremely, 
good. If, then, the love of God is the very 
soul and substance of all righteousness, how 
shall we love him? 

Better ask, Why, when he is the one altogether 
lovely, do we love him so little? Why so 



LOVE THE SOURCE OP RIGHTEOUSNESS. 25 

much cold philosophy, and so little warm heart 
religion? Why have we come to think that 
the very word love, when applied to God, means 
a different thing from the warm reaching out 
of the heart's sympathies and longings which 
we feel toward a friend ? Perchance, when 
applied to him, it means a mixture of awe and 
reverence more nearly approaching to fear 
and even terror than to love. Ah ! all this 
comes from having false and pagan ideas of 
God; we have not yet seen that God is love. 
When we have, perfect love will cast out fear, 
because fear hath torment. 

But says one, "How shall I love God? I 
have tried and tried. ' ' Poor soul ! try no lon- 
ger. Love does not come in that way. It is 
not pushed out from within by any sort of 
resolution; it is drawn out from without, by 
the sight of that which is lovely and lovable. 
Stop ; cease thy struggling and trying ; look at 
Him as revealed in his work and his word. Is 
he not the chiefest among ten thousand, the 
Rose of Sharon, the Lily of the Valley, the 
One altogether lovely ? Do not thine eyes, 
even now, behold the King in his beauty ? 
God knows full well that all righteousness is 
simply love to him, and he knows it is im- 
possible for us to make ourselves love that 
which is not lovable; so creation and redemp- 
tion are twin efforts of the divine One to re- 
veal his mighty love to the soul that will but 
stop to look and live. It is his love that 



26 GOD IS LOVE. 

painted for thine eyes the blush of beauty on 
the rose's cheek. To regale thy sense he gave 
that rose its perfumed breath. The delicate 
tints and traceries of the thousand forms of 
beauty in thy path are so many evidences of 
his loving care, — a care that, comprehending 
all, stoops from sweeping stars and suns to 
note the sparrow's fall. Ah, he it is that piles 
yon sunset clouds into such wondrous forms 
of temple and palace and pyramid, pouring 
over all such floods of golden light, to gild 
the very edge of darkness, that through these 
fairy gateways we almost fancy there lies the 
city of our hopes and dreams, and all our as- 
pirations and longings seem not far to reach 
and realize ! Does not his voice speak to thee 
in all this, telling thee that in the very closing 
in of the night of sorrow and darkness and 
death there may come to thee the bursting of 
a fairer day ? 

Is it not his love of which the birds sing ? 
and from the murmuring of the wind-swept 
pine breaks not his sighing sympathy on thy 
soul? The ceaseless beating of the ocean on 
the rocky beach, what is it but the throbbing 
of his mighty heart against the barriers of 
selfishness and sin that hold thee from him ? 
Listen ! does not that heart beat in sympathy 
with human sorrow and human pain ? do not 
those mighty arms reach out to enfold and 
encompass every land ? ' ' Why sayest thou, 
O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is 



LOVE THE SOURCE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 27 

hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed 
over from my God ? Hast thou not known ? 
hast thou not heard? that the everlasting God, 
the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, 
f ainteth not, neither is weary ? there is no 
searching of his understanding." We must 
not limit his care or set bounds to his love. 

He who holdeth the worlds in the hollow 
of his hand, he who "bringeth out their host 
by number" and "calleth them all by names 
by the greatness of his might, for that he is 
strong in power; not one faileth, " he it is that 
saith, " Comfort ye, comfort ye my people." 
He it is who puts our tears in his bottle, and 
writes them all in his book. O that men 
would look and listen till the thought of God 
revealed in nature's myriad forms, and speak- 
ing through her varied voices, might thrill 
their own hearts with his divine love ! Then 
would the loneliness and the isolation of the 
hungry soul be gone, and above and below and 
round about us, enfolding us and wrapping us 
in with him, should we feel and know the sym- 
pathetic presence of that mind whose power 
upholds the universe, but whose love lis- 
tens to the softest sigh of sorrow. Then with 
Carlisle might we well say, "Ah, sweeter 
than the mother's voice to the child that strays 
bewildered on the trackless world, comes this 
evangel to my heart ! The universe is no 
longer dead and demoniacal, a charnel house 



28 GOD IS LOVE. 

peopled with specters, but godlike, and my 
Father's." 

And what can we say here of the revelation 
of God's love in redemption? With what 
words shall we speak, even afar off, of the 
unspeakable? This we can say with Paul, 
Who shall separate us from that love ? ' ' Shall 
tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or fam- 
ine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword ? Nay, 
in all these things we are more than conquerors 
through him that loved us. For I am per- 
suaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, 
nor principalities, nor powers, nor things pres- 
ent, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, 
nor any other creature, shall be able to separate 
us from the love of God, which is in Christ 
Jesus our Lord." But rather that, Christ 
dwelling in our hearts by faith, we may be 
rooted and grounded in love, and be able to 
comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, 
and length, and depth, and height, and to 
know the love of Christ, that passeth knowl- 
edge, that we may be filled with all the fullness 
of God, 

Yes, to know the love of God is to be filled 
with his fullness, for God is love. All good- 
ness, all righteousness is, love, and love is 
born of love, the human of the divine; so the 
all-important thing to know is that God is 
love. To know this is life eternal. 



CHAPTER IV. 



SATAN'S EFFORT TO HIDE GOD'S LOVE FROM 
HUNGRY HUMAN HEARTS. 



When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, 
and the father of it.— John 8 : 44. 

All true righteousness is simply the dwelling 
of the divine love in the human heart and 
its consequent manifestation in human action. 
It is utterly impossible for anyone to love 
anything simply by resolving or trying to do 
so. Love is born of love; it is kindled in 
the soul by beholding and knowing Him who 
is lovable. 

As therefore all redeeming power — all power 
to make righteous — is the power to beget 
love in the human soul, and as this can be 
done only by the manifestation of greater 
love, it follows that all of God's power to 
redeem the world is simply his power to 
manifest his mighty love for humanity. This 
agrees with what John says, "We love him 
because he first loved us," and "God so loved 
the world, that he gave his only begotten 
Son," etc. Because of these facts, we have 

[29] 



30 GOD IS LOVE. 

seen that creation and redemption are both 
efforts of God to manifest his love to his 
creatures. 

Now the converse of all this is that the 
power of Satan to defeat the work of God 
in the human soul is simply his power to 
defeat the manifestation of God's love; and 
just as the original proposition is proved by 
all of God's dealings with humanity, so also 
this is proved by every effort of Satan to 
thwart the divine plan. Every false doctrine 
and every false system of worship introduced 
into the world by Satan, we shall see, if we 
look at them carefully, have had for their one 
sole object the making the whole story of the 
love of God a lie. 

In the very beginning Satan said to Eve, 
"Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of 
every tree of the garden ? " In the original 
this ' ' yea ' ' is simply an expression of con- 
tempt or scorn. When Eve answered, "We 
may eat of the fruit of the trees of the 
garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is 
in the midst of the garden, God hath said, 
Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch 
it, lest ye die," Satan said again in contempt 
of God, ' ' Ye shall not surely die ; for God 
doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, 
then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall 
be as gods, knowing good and evil." This 
was a direct denial of God's love. God had 
placed that tree there in love, for the good of 



SATAN'S EFFORT TO HIDE GOD'S LOVE. 31 

his children, to furnish an opportunity for 
the development of character, which would 
otherwise, in their then present state, be im- 
possible. In love he had said, Ye must not 
eat of it, even as the father says to the child, 
You must not eat of these berries, my son, 
they are poison. Satan knew all this, but 
denied it, to make it appear that God, in envy 
or jealous fear, was refusing his children 
something which was for their good, and 
which would elevate them to an equality with 
him. Satan lied, and by that lie he brought 
from Christ himself the indignant denunciation 
of being a "liar from the beginning, and the 
father of it." 

It is not too much to say that all false re- 
ligion is a logical development from that lie, 
although we cannot here take time and space 
to show this definitely. No matter how many 
gods they worshiped, every civilized pagan 
nation has had a tradition, more or less vague 
and fanciful perhaps, — a tradition forgotten 
by the multitude, it may be, and only cherished 
by the elite, the educated few, and yet a tra- 
dition still, — that there is one God back of 
all these gods, who made them, and who made 
all things. Why did they not worship him? 
— Because they did not believe that he cared 
for them. They thought him so great and 
so far away that the human soul was beneath 
his notice, that the crushing out of all the race 



32 GOD IS LOVE. 

of man would be no more to him than the 
crushing of a worm to us. 

And because this God was so far away, 
they went on inserting gods and demigods, 
and kings and priests between him and the 
human heart, till no sorrowing, suffering soul 
would ever think or dare to reach up the 
trembling hand of faith for the soothing, 
sympathetic touch of him who was truly and 
really divine. To such a world as this Jesus 
came to reveal the true God, and the God he 
revealed was Emanuel, God with us; and to 
such a people as this Paul taught the sublime 
truth that God is "not far from every one 
of us ; for in him we live, and move, and have 
our being; . . . for we are also his off- 
spring. ' ' * 

The same thing that Satan accomplished in 
paganism he has also accomplished in the pa- 
pacy. To papists, God is the stern, the distant 
judge, incapable of human sympathy or love, 
and Christ the mediator and intercessor, whose 
duty it is, if possible, to touch the heart of 
God with a feeling of our needs, and arouse 
his compassion. But even Christ is not 
touched with the feelings of all our infirmities ; 
so he must be approached through the medi- 
ation of the Virgin, his mother, and of 
canonized saint, and living pope, and bishop, 
and priest. Thus again God is placed far 
away, and the beautiful, the living fact of his 
love is denied. He is no more ' ' our Father, ' * 



SATAN'S EFFORT TO HIDE GOD'S LOVE. 33 

who takes delight in giving good gifts to 
his children. 

Every pagan religion has its sacrifice, and 
this sacrifice is derived from the true Sacrifice 
by which the world is to be redeemed, through 
a degeneracy from the true type of that sac- 
rifice which God gave to man at the gate of 
forfeited Eden. But Satan has brought it 
around so that the pagan sacrifice means just 
the opposite of the true. The meaning of the 
true sacrifice is this: "God so loved the world, 
that he gave his only begotten Son. ' ' Every 
sacrifice truly offered was a revelation, an 
expression of that great sacrifice by which 
God was to give the pledge to all his intelli- 
gent creatures of all worlds that he so loved 
them that, if need be, he would give Ms life to re- 
deem them. But the pagan sacrifice speaks of 
a god of wrath and anger, whose wrath must 
in some way be appeased, perchance by the 
blood of a lamb, or it may be only by the 
blood of a fair maid, or innocent child, or 
some other human victim. When he smells 
the freshly flowing blood, they believe his ven- 
geance will be satisfied, he will be propitiated. 

What shall we say of the false idea of the 
atonement, held even by many in the popular 
Protestant churches of today, and expressed 
in a late confession of faith in these words, 
' ' Christ died to reconcile the Father unto us " ? 
This is not the place to enter into a dis- 
cussion of that theme; suffice it to say that 

3 



34 GOD IS LOVE. 

it is the pagan idea of sacrifice applied to 
Christianity. God, they think, was angry ; he 
must pour forth his wrath upon some one. 
If upon man, it would eternally damn him, as 
he deserved; but this would interfere with 
God's plan and purpose in creating the worlds, 
so this must not be. And yet God must not 
be cheated of his vengeance ; for this reason 
he pours it forth upon Christ, that man may 
go free. So when Christ died, he was slain 
really by the wrath and anger of the Father. 

This is paganism. The true idea of the 
atonement makes God and Christ equal in 
their love, and one in their purpose of saving 
humanity. "God was in Christ, reconciling 
the world unto himself. ' ' The life of Christ 
was not the price paid to the Father for our 
pardon; but that life was the price tohich the 
Father paid to so manifest his loving power 
as to bring us to that repentant attitude of 
mind where he could pardon us freely. The 
contrast between the true and the false ideas 
is tersely stated by the prophet in these 
words : / ' Surely he hath borne our griefs and 
carried our sorrows ; yet ive did esteem him 
stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. ' ' 2 Thus 
Satan has transformed the truth of God's 
love into a lie, and even infused this lie into 
the very doctrine of the atonement of Christ. 

These are but illustrations of the nature 
and tendency of all false systems. They are 
the devil's designs to thwart the power and 



SATAN'S EFFORT TO HIDE GOD'S LOVE. 35 

purpose of the divine love. The doctrine of 
inherent immortality — u ye shall not surely 
die" — on which all these false systems rest 
for their hope of the future, comes to its 
legitimate fruitage in the terrible God -de- 
faming belief in eternal conscious misery for 
all the multitudes of the lost. 

Again : Satan transforms the glorious love- 
revealing truth of God's eternal purpose in 
creation into the stern doctrine of " absolute 
decrees," which doctrine accuses God of crea- 
ting the multitudes for hell, and without giving 
them any chance to escape, turning them 
hopelessly into the place which Satan has 
invented for them, the few who are saved 
being also saved by God's absolute decree, 
and so, of course, in spite of themselves. 
These two doctrines, inherent immortality and 
absolute decrees, combine to make the theology 
of the world what it has been and is, and 
this combination finds its fullest development 
in the teaching of what may be called the 
"Ultra Calvinism of the Scottish Kirk." 
What that was, Buckle, in his "History of 
Civilization, ' ' states as follows : — 

" The clergy boasted that it was their special mission 
to thunder out the wrath and curses of the Lord. In 
their eyes the Deity was not a beneficent being, but a 
cruel and remorseless tyrant. They declared that all 
mankind, a very small portion only excepted, were 
doomed to eternal misery. And when they came to de- 
scribe what that misery was, their dark imaginations 
reveled and gloated in the prospect- In the pictures 



36 GOD IS LOVE. 

which they drew they reproduced and heightened the 
barbarous imagery of a barbarous age. They delighted 
in telling their hearers that they would be roasted in 
great fires, and hung up by their tongues. They were 
to be lashed with scorpions, and see their companions 
writhing and howling around them. They were to be 
thrown into boiling oil and scalding lead. A river of 
fire and brimstone, broader than the eartti, was pre- 
pared for them; in that they were to be immersed; their 
bones, their lungs, and their liver were to boil, but 
never to be consumed. At the same time, worms were 
to prey upon them, and while these were gnawiDg at 
their bodies, they were to be surrounded by devils, 
mocking a ad making pastime of their pains. Such 
were the first stages of their suffering, and they were 
only the first ; for the tortures, besides being unceasing, 
were to become gradually worse. 

"So refined was their cruelty that one hell was suc- 
ceeded by another ; and, lest the sufferer should after 
a time grow callous, he was moved on that he might 
undergo fresh agonies in fresh places. All this was the 
work of the God of the Scotch clergy. It was not only 
his work, but it was his joy and pride; for, according to 
them, hell was created before man came into the world. 
The Almighty, they did not scruple to say, had spent 
his previous leisure in preparing and completing this 
place of torture, so that when the human race appeared, 
it might be ready for their reception. Ample, however, 
as the arrangements were, they were insufficient, and 
hell, not being big enough to contain the countless vic- 
tims incessantly poured into it, had, in these latter days, 
been enlarged. But in that vast expanse there was now 
no void, for the whole of it reverberated with the 
shrieks and yells of undying agony." 

All this and much more might be given, 
and, incredible as it may seem, every expres- 
sion is taken from sermons and books actually 
preached or read at that time. No real 
Christian need be told that this is the work 



SATAN'S EFFORT TO HIDE GOD'S LOVE. 37 

of Satan to blind men to the love of God, 
which is the only power that can draw them 
to him and make them righteous. In con- 
trast with all this, put the beautiful words 
of Whittier ; — 

"But still my human hands are weak 
To hold your iron creeds; 
Against the words ye bid me speak 
My heart within me pleads. 

******* 

"I walk with bare hnshed feet the ground 
Ye tread with boldness shod; 
I dare not fix with mete and bound 
The love and power of God. 

" Ye praise his justice ; even such 
His pitying love I deem ; 
Ye seek a king, I fain would touch 
The robe that hath no seam. 



"Not mine to look where cherubim 
And seraph may not see; 
But nothing can be good in him 
Yv r hich evil is in me. 

"The wrong that pains my soul below, 
I dare not throne above; 
I know not of his hate, — I know 
His goodness and his love. 

******* 

"I know not what the future hath 
Of marvel or surprise, 
Assured alone that life and death 
His mercy underlies. 

******* 

"I know not where his islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air ; 
I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond his love and care." 



CHAPTER V. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 



"After this manner therefore pray ye, 
Our Father which art in heaven."— Jesus. 

God is love ; all his attributes are the 
attributes of love. His justice, his wisdom, 
his power, his mercy, and even his wrath and 
anger, are only different faces of the many- 
sided but all-embracing and eternal love. It 
follows that the motive of God's action must 
be ever love's own. Love has no motive of 
policy or pride ; in fact it has but one motive, 
and that is love itself. Whatever love does 
is for love's sake, to give pleasure to the 
object loved, and thus to receive pleasure in 
return. With these thoughts in view, we ask 
the question, Why did God create this world 
and place man upon it ? Why did he create 
at all, and why, having begun, did he con- 
tinue his work till the infinite abysses of 
unfathomed space are all "throbbing and 
palpitant ' ' with suns and circling worlds ? 

The inspired apostle gives the answer: 
"Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory 
and honor and power; for thou hast created 

[38] 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 39 

all things, and for thy pleasure they are and 
were created. 1 ' 1 

Some one may say, "Yes, God is selfish as 
we are ; he did it all for his own pleasure. ' ' 
But it must be remembered that the pleasure 
of love is never selfish. The pleasure of love 
is to love and be loved, — so to manifest itself 
as to bring return of love. If the imagination 
may dare such flights, conceive of God before 
the work of creation was begun. God is 
love; he was love then, for he is the same 
yesterday, today, and forever. He inhabiteth 
eternity. He was love, but he was alone, 
and love alone is lonely. The infinite heart, 
with all its tenderness, its sympathy, its 
power of affection, was alone, locked up by 
itself, with no other possible means of expres- 
sion, only by creation. This was why God 
created, for his pleasure, — for love's pleasure, 
that love might so express itself as to bring 
return of love. 

Man was made in the image of God. This 
image was largely lost through sin, and is to 
be restored through redemption, for we are 
to be "renewed in knowledge after the image 
of him that created" us. 2 Thus we see that 
this image does not consist in outward form 
merely, but also in the inward facts of feeling 
and thinking and knowing. 

What is it in the human heart that creates 
all our homes, and builds up and binds to- 
gether every true family ? We call it the 



40 GOD IS LOVE. 

desire for offspring, but what is the desire 
for offspring but the desire of love to express 
itself in such a manner, as to bring return of 
love from loving hands, and loving eyes, and 
loving voices ? This is perhaps the strongest 
inherent desire of the human heart. Inherited 
from whom? — From God, when he made us 
in his image. 

It has often been said that the true home 
is a little w^orld in itself. It is this desire in 
the human heart that creates these little 
worlds everywhere, and makes them centers 
of light, and love, and joy, till this old earth, 
it sometimes seems, is akin to heaven. It 
was this desire in the heart of divine Love 
that created this world, and all worlds, and 
peopled them with intelligent beings, capable 
of appreciating his love and returning him 
joyful loving service. 

He made the world for his pleasure. His 
loving, lonely heart sought expression by its 
only means, creation, and the universe is 
but the materialization of that divine thought 
of love. This is what we mean by the Father- 
hood of God. Christ dwelt upon this more 
than upon any other truth. It was he that 
taught us to say, "Our Father which art in 
heaven." Oh, there is something in those 
words, "our Father," that seems to bring 
God so near that we know and feel that he 
will hear faith's faintest cry of sorrow and 
need, and see the smallest signal of distress ! 



THE FATHERHOOD OP GOD. 41 

' ' Our Father ' ' — what do the words mean ?' 
What but that, as we are the fathers of our 
children, so he is the Father of us all, only 
he is more willing and more tender. 3 

The father's pleasure is in the happiness 
and success of his children. With every 
advance step of the son or daughter into new 
prosperity and usefulness, new and higher joy 
comes to the father's heart. So the " pleas- 
ure ' ' of God is identical with the highest 
possible happiness of all his creatures. So 
long as in one world there shall be one indi- 
vidual who has not yet arrived at the highest 
heights of the happiness of which he is 
capable, so long there is some joy of which 
God is capable, that he has not yet reached. 
Thus love binds man's interests and God's 
interests, and man's happiness and God's 
happiness, in one; and step by step through- 
out the ages of the future, as the race of 
intelligent beings marches on through greater 
knowledge to grander joys, God himself will 
lead them and participate with them in that 
higher happiness. "They shall hunger no 
more, neither thirst any more ; neither shall 
the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the 
Lamb which is in the midst of the throne 
shall feed them, and shall lead them unto 
living fountains of waters ; and God shall 
wipe away all tears from their eyes." 

So much for the future ; but here it is com- 
forting to remember that the same love that 



42 GOD IS LOVE. 

rejoices in our joy suffers also in our sorrow. 
Jesus was the man of sorrows, and acquainted 
with grief, because he bore our griefs and 
carried our sorrows. Our sympathies are so 
narrow ! If any grief comes within the little 
circle of our family and friends, we feel it, 
but what is the wide world to us ? The little 
lake may sometimes be tossed with tempests 
within its narrow vale, but if the sun shines 
there, it smiles peacefully from between its 
fringing trees, no matter how the storms may 
rage elsewhere. Not so with the great ocean, 
whose mighty arms encompass every land. It 
holds the great world to its heart. It feels 
the ague thrill of every earthquake shock, 
and its waves toss high to the breath of 
every storm. So the Saviour took the suffer- 
ing world in his arms, and held it to his 
heart. He put himself en rapport with human- 
ity. The great toiling, sorrowing, struggling 
mass of human life lay heavily on his sympa- 
thetic soul. He bore our griefs, he carried 
our sorrows. He is the same today. "We 
have not an High Priest that cannot be 
touched with the feelings of our infirmities." 
But what was Jesus in the world for? — To 
reveal the Father. He said, "I and my 
Father are one. " " He that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father." He revealed a God who 
is "our Father," whose great heart of love 
ever beats in sympathy with a sorrowing, 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 43 

sin -sick humanity, and who loves us ever, 
even in our sins, because he made us that he 
might have some one to love. 

Weary soul, why not come to him and con- 
fess your sin, and accept the comfort and the 
consolation of his love ? Why stay away be- 
cause of fear ? Why fancy lQnger that he 
loves you only when you may chance to feel 
yourself that you have done well and nobly ? 
Why think that days of penance and weeping 
are necessary after you have sinned before 
he will receive you? 

Even now his arms are open for you. Even 
now the Saviour knocks at the door of your 
heart. Does the mother love the boy only 
when he is good, and forget and hate him 
when he is wayward ? Does not her love 
cling to him ever, tenderer still in the darkest 
hour of his sin ? Is it not the cord to draw 
him back to virtue and to joy ? 

So does not the goodness of God lead thee 
even now to repentance ? Dost not thou hear 
him say to thee, ' ' The mother may forget the 
child, but I will not forget thee ' ' ? O that 
we might ever realize that we are his chil- 
dren, and that he made us for the joy of 
loving us and of having us love him ; and 
that, while self -exiled, feeding on the swine's 
husks of earthly hopes and pleasures, he 
mourns us as his children still, though lost, 
ever holding himself ready to run and meet 



44 GOD IS LOVE. 

us a long way off on our return, and greet us 
with kisses of joy ? 

To realize this is to know God, and to 
know him is to love him, and this is life 
eternal. 



CHAPTER VI. 



THE GLORY OP GOD. 



-'How would it make the weight and wonder less, 
If, lifted from immortal shoulders down, 
The worlds were cast on seas of emptiness, 
In realms without a crown ?" — Jean Ingelow. 

Before leaving the subject of God's love as 
revealed in creation, let us consider one more 
text. Rev. 4 : 11 says that God created all 
things for his pleasure. We have learned what 
that pleasure was, and what it reveals to us 
of divine love. 

In Isa. 43 : 7 God says of man, * ' I have 
created him for my glory. ' ' The glory of God 
is not a mere external glory of rainbows and 
radiant brightness upon which no eye can 
look. When Moses, emboldened by God's 
precious promise of his presence and rest, 
sought to draw still nearer the Lord, and 
dared to make still greater requests, he said, 
"I beseech thee, show me thy glory." In 
reply, instead of blinding Moses' eyes by re- 
moving the black cloud that obscured his 
brightness, the Lord said, "I will make all 
my goodness pass before thee." Then the 
Lord descended in the cloud, . . . and 

[45] 



46 GOD IS LOVE. 

proclaimed the name of the Lord. "And the 
Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, 
The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and 
gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in good- 
ness and truth. " This, then, according to 
his own express declaration, is God's true 
glory — Ms goodness. 

The external glory is but the result and 
outward manifestation of his goodness; and 
without this goodness the rainbow round 
about the throne would fade, and the un- 
speakable brightness, now mercifully shaded 
from mortal eyes, would pale into sickly 
glory flickering down into darkness. 

When Moses knew this, he made haste, 
and bowed his head toward the earth, and 
worshiped; and so will we. O that the 
whole world might see it and know it ! that 
they might turn with loving obedience to 
him ! that, beholding the glory of his good- 
ness, they might see therein revealed their 
selfishness and sin ! Then with Job might 
they say, "I have heard of thee by the hear- 
ing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee. 
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust 
and ashes." It was thus to reveal God that 
Jesus came. 

God made man "for his glory," — for his 
goodness. That is, God, because of his glory 
— his goodness — because he is Love, made 
man a sentient, intelligent, morally responsi- 
ble, and morally appreciative being, that he 



THE GLORY OP GOD. 47 

might reveal to him and in him his own 
goodness and glory; that man might thus, by- 
returning to God due meed of love and 
thanksgiving, be "to the praise of the glory 
of his grace." And all this will be accom- 
plished in spite of sin and sorrow; for Paul 
says, "I reckon that the sufferings of this 
present time are not worthy to be compared 
with the glory which shall be revealed in us." 
And that this glory is the glory of the divine 
goodness to be revealed in his children, he 
shows by immediately adding, "The earnest 
expectation of the creature waiteth for the 
manifestation of the sons of God." If this 
glory — this goodness — can be revealed in us, 
all other glory will follow in due time. 

But God created us to reveal this glory to 
us and in us. In the beginning he placed our 
infant race under angelic tuition, — children 
standing before the mighty mysteries of crea- 
tion, every fact of which, as it should open 
before them, would reveal a Father's love, a 
Father's goodness, a Father's glory. 

The child may awake to consciousness in a 
palace, surrounded by attendants and every- 
thing for his comfort, but with the father 
absent. At first his wants are purely physi- 
cal. He needs but to eat and sleep; and the 
food is provided, and the means of rest. By 
and by the intellect begins to awaken, and it 
demands food for thought. The child wanders 
into another room, and finds shelves of books 



48 GOD IS LOVE. 

suited to his needs, and as his mind develops, 
demanding stronger food, he discovers volume 
after volume, — a magnificent library, e very- 
book stored with the grandest thoughts of 
the greatest thinkers. Among others he dis- 
covers a beautiful volume, every word of it 
written in letters of love, — an autobiography 
of his father's life, telling when he built the 
palace, where he is now, why he is absent, 
and when he will return. 

By and by the love of the beautiful, the 
basis of all art, begins to manifest itself in 
the child, and to demand satisfaction. Be- 
hold, one day the boy tries a key in a neg- 
lected door of the great mansion, and lo, a 
splendid gallery of art, a little world in itself, 
created for him by gifted hands, and brought 
together here into this cosmos of beauty for 
his enjoyment. Beyond it is a music room 
with various instruments inviting him, and 
gifted musicians by their own sweet songs 
teaching him to touch the first notes. With 
the consciousness of every new need comes 
the discovery of the means of its satisfaction, 
till every day the child is compelled to say 
with surprise, " Father knows, father loves me, 
and has provided for every want." 

Such a palace is this world, with its music 
and its varied beauty of mountain and valley, 
it gorgeous glories of sunset clouds, and its 
moonlit, star - gemmed evening skies ! It is 
true an enemy has crept into this palace, and 



THE GLORY OF GOD. 49 

now some of the doors are locked, to be 
opened only by golden keys. But we know 
that the Father has provided means for the 
speedy extermination of this selfish fiend ; and 
even now we can see Love's original purpose 
through it all, — that every want should be 
satisfied, and every noble desire gratified. 
There is beauty for the eye, and the eye for 
beauty; music for the ear, and the ear for 
music ; fragrance for the nostril, and the nos- 
tril for fragrance; sweet for the taste, and 
the taste for sweet; and the dear Father 
made and mated them all. 

Not all the growing needs of this mighty 
family can ever get one whit in advance of 
Love's omniscient forethought, that guided 
his hand at creation's dawn. When the wood 
is insufficient for fuel, and the candle for 
light, the coal and oil are discovered in another 
room in the palace, where Father stored them 
long ago. At every thoughtful step we have 
to say, " Father knows, and Father loves." 

Why is all this? — Because God created this 
world and the universe for his pleasure and 
his glory, and Love's pleasure and glory is 
so to manifest itself as to receive return of 
love from loving, willing hearts. God created 
all the world by Jesus Christ. 1 "All things 
were made by him [Christ] ; and without him 
was not anything made that was made. " " He 
was in the world, and the world was made 
by him, and the world knew him not." 2 He 

4 



50 GOD IS LOVE. 

made but one family in this world in the 
beginning, that "all nations of men for to 
dwell on all the face of the earth" might be 
of one blood. 3 Jesus Christ was the Father 
of that one family which was to people this 
world. He was also the Father of the families 
which were to people all other worlds, so 
that in him the inhabitants of all worlds find 
a common Father and a universal brotherhood 
of being. Thus it was designed that all in- 
telligent beings should constitute but one 
family, and that Christ should be the Father. 
This is what the prophet means when he 
says of Jesus: "For unto us a child is born, 
unto us a son is given; and the government 
shall be upon his shoulder; and his name 
shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The 
Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The 
Prince of Peace." 4 

But Jesus himself was the only begotten 
Son of the Father. So God the Father is our 
Father through Christ; and the inhabitants 
of all worlds were to be one brotherhood, one 
family, in him, that God through Christ might 
reveal to them and in them his love and his 
goodness, that they might behold his glory ; 
for it pleased the Father that in him (Christ) 
should all fullness dwell. 5 

Of this family and this love Paul speaks 
when he says : ' * For this cause I bow my 
knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven 



THE GLORY OF GOD. 51 

and earth is named, that he would grant you, 
according to the riches of his glory, to be 
strengthened with might by his Spirit in the 
inner man; that Christ may dwell in your 
hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and 
grounded in love, may be able to comprehend 
with all saints what is the breadth, and length, 
and depth, and height; and to know the love 
of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye 
might be filled with all the fullness of God. ' ' 6 

This glory — this goodness — this love — 
which God sought to reveal to his children in 
creation, has been obscured by sin, and by 
sorrow, the result of sin, but a voice sweeter 
than the mother's voice to the suffering child 
says, " Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.'' 
1 ' Every valley shall be exalted, and every 
mountain and hill shall be made low ; and the 
crooked shall be made straight, and the rough 
places plain; and the glory of the Lord shall 
be revealed, and all flesh shall see it to- 
gether." That voice is Jesus' voice, and by 
him the work will be accomplished, and the 
original purpose of creation, with all its love, 
stand revealed. 

O, the deep, dark valleys of humiliation and 
suffering we are sometimes called to pass 
through, — lowest of all, the valley of the 
shadow of death ! Yet his love shall light the 
way, and the valley by his presence shall be 
exalted into the very gates of heaven. The 
high mountains of human misery that have 



52 GOD IS LOVE. 

cast their baleful shadow on our lives, shut- 
ting out the sunshine of heaven from our 
hearts, will be brought low. 

What has seemed to us so crooked and 
unjust here, — the prosperity of the wicked, 
the adversity of the righteous, those mysteri- 
ous providences w T hich sometimes seem like 
chance, and tempt us to think that He know- 
eth not our griefs, nor careth for our sorrows, 
— all this will be made clear and straight. 
And the rough ways over which our bruised 
and bleeding feet have trod so wearily, these, 
too, shall be made plain. Our eager eyes, 
scanning the rugged pathway, shall behold 
traces of his bloody footprints ; and from the 
distant heights, whither he, too, has ascended 
through suffering, we shall hear his voice 
saying, "Come unto me, and I will give you 
rest. ' ' United with him, God shall wipe away 
all tears from our eyes. 

All this will be accomplished, for this w r as 
God's pleasure in creation. Sin may seem to 
have thwarted his plan for a time ; but ' ' help 
has been laid upon One who is mighty,'' and 
"the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in 
his hands." 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE UNITY OF THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL. 



•'The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul."— David. 

God created all things by Jesus Christ, and 
therefore Christ is the "mighty God," the 
' ' everlasting Father ' ' of all intelligent beings 
in all worlds. God the Father is the Father 
of Christ, and therefore through him of all 
these beings created by Christ. Thus God, 
Father and Son, unite in themselves all the 
morally accountable beings in the universe 
into one family ; and it was the design that 
we should know and own our brotherhood, 
not only to all men, but to angels and the 
inhabitants of all worlds. 

Now the All -Father gave to his children 
certain rules or laws to regulate their con- 
duct. These laws were not arbitrary, not 
designed to show his right or power to boss, 
or domineer, over his children, but, like the 
rules of all well-regulated families, they were 
designed to promote the happiness of all the 
children, and the unity of the family life. 

[53] 



54 GOD IS LOVE. 

Although many might hesitate to express it 
thus, the thought that lingers in their minds 
is about like this : ' ' God is arbitrary and 
obstinate, and will not permit the slightest 
variation from his laws without plunging us 
into eternal death." This is what Satan has 
ever said of God and of his government. I 
desire to show the contrary so that all may 
see. I desire to show that it is the variation 
itself that plunges us into eternal death, and 
not the arbitrary decree of God. It is the 
love of God that will not in any way counte- 
nance that variation, because it leads to such 
terrible results. 

The law of God is not simply his fiat; it 
rests on eternal principles of pleasure and 
pain, — principles as unchangeable in their 
very nature as the laws that govern the 
seasons or control the motions of the planets. 
The law is not so simply because God said 
so, but he said so because it was so, and 
because it must eternally and universally 
be so. 

On the correct understanding of these prin- 
ciples of the nature of God's law depends our 
power to comprehend God's love in all his 
dealings with his creatures. On this rests 
the whole philosophy of the purpose of crea- 
tion and of the plan of redemption. The 
existence of misery and suffering, the need 
for an atonement, and how that atonement is 
accomplished by Christ, can be understood in 



UNITY OF LAW AND GOSPEL. 5o 

the light of God's love only as the nature of 
his law stands revealed. It is for this reason 
that we purpose to dwell at some length in 
these pages on the nature of God's law. 

We have always thought of the ten com- 
mandments as requiring our love to God and 
to all his creatures ; have we ever thought of 
them as an expression of his love to us ? It 
would be absolutely foolish to demand our 
love by arbitrary fiat ; love cannot be given 
in that way ; love is born only of love. The 
state might as well legislate that the sun 
should not shine or that water should not 
flow downhill, as for the Lord to make such 
arbitrary demand for love. In either case the 
law could not affect in the slightest the thing 
legislated about. 

Yet it remains true that all the law of God 
requires is love, and that, as the apostle says, 
love is the fulfilling of the law, — of the whole 
law. How is this ? — Simply that the law it- 
self, when we understand it, is a revelation of 
such infinite love as to beget within us a re- 
turning, responsive love that can and will ful- 
fill the law. 

"God is love." Every word, every jot 
and tittle, of that law, coming from love, re- 
quires only such service as love dictates. 
When the same love which that law expresses 
to us is begotten by it in our hearts, and 
flows out toward God and all his creatures in 
loving actions, then the law is fulfilled. 



56 GOD IS LOVE. 

It may be objected that the divine love, to 
beget returning love in us, is revealed, not 
in the law, but only in the life and death of 
Jesus Christ. In one sense this is true, and 
in another it is not true. The love that God 
sought to reveal in his law, and throughout 
all the administration of that law in his gov- 
ernment, has been denied by Satan from the 
beginning ; ' ' for he is a liar, " " and abode 
not in the truth. ' ' It has also been so ob- 
scured and hidden by sin and sorrow that 
many have not beheld it. But the love of 
God as revealed in Jesus Christ is no new 
love for us. God is the same; "with him is 
no variableness, neither shadow of turning." 
All this love for us he had from the begin- 
ning, and he expressed it in his law ; only 
the devil denied it, and sin obscured it. 
Christ simply revealed the love that God had 
ever borne us, and that underlies all his laws 
and government. 

The life of Christ is the law of God in ac- 
tion; his death, but the natural result of 
perfectly keeping that law, and perfectly pro- 
claiming it to others, in a world that hated 
truth and goodness. Look at that life and 
death of immaculate love. In all this did 
Christ do more than the law requires ? — Im- 
possible, for then he were more than perfect; 
for the psalmist says, "The law of the Lord 
is perfect" Christ's life, then, reveals no new 
love, but to hearts that were hardened and 



UNITY OF LAW AND GOSPEL. 57 

to eyes that were blinded by sin he reveals 
anew the same love which dictated every 
word of that law. 

There is no conflict between Sinai and Cal- 
vary. "Thy law is the truth," said David, 
and "all thy commandments are righteous- 
ness." Again, "Make me to go in the path of 
thy commandments." Jesus was the "right- 
eous servant" who was to justify many by 
his righteousness. He says, "I am the ivay, 
the truth, and the life." He was and is the 
Prince of Peace and the manifestation of 
mercy. In him "mercy and truth are met 
together ; righteousness and peace have kissed 
each other." 

We have seen that all created intelligent 
beings find a common Father, and hence a 
universal brotherhood, in God; now we wish 
to see that all of God's dealings with his 
morally accountable creatures are simply the 
dealings of a loving parent with his children. 
This must be so if he is "our Father." Is 
he not a good Father ? The very word God 
means good. If he be convicted of being 
other than good in anything, he is no longer 
God. This were to dethrone him, and then — 

"Who the orphaned moons doth lead, 
And who the unfathered spheres?" 

Is he not love? and can love act other than 
lovingly ? To show that God acts from other 
motive than love is to show that he is not 
God, for "God is love." Hear him: "Ye 



58 GOD IS LOVE. 

are my witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am 
God." Have we always witnessed thus? Have 
we not all in our hearts a thousand times 
doubted his love, while believing fully in the 
love of some human friend ? Ah, this is to 
exalt the human above the divine, — this is 
idolatry ! 

Perchance our lives have been sad and 
dark, and we have wondered why, and thus 
been led to doubt. Jesus was the only be- 
gotten Son of the Father, loved by him be- 
fore the worlds were, and yet while here he 
was a ' ' Man of sorrows and acquainted w r ith 
grief." He, the Captain of our salvation, was 
"made perfect through suffering." This is 
the ministry of sorrow. Do you not know, 
sorrowing and tempted one, that the shadow^ 
cannot fall except the sun be shining over- 
head ? ' ' When the mists have cleared away, ' ' 
and we see the Father's face, and know as 
we are known, ah, then we shall see that — 

"Darkness in the pathway of man's life 
Is but the shadow of God's providence, 
By the great Sun of wisdom cast thereon; 
And what is dark below will be light in heaven. " 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE NATURE OF THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT. 



"'My times are in thy hand;' 

Why should I doubt or fear ? 
My Father's hand will never cause 
His child a needless tear."— William F. Lloyd. 

God is "our Father," and it was his de- 
sign that we should recognize him as such, 
and that, thus united in him, all intelligent 
beings should find a universal brotherhood. 
This being true, it follows that God's laws 
and his methods of enforcing them — in short, 
all of his dealings with us in this w r orld — 
are those of a loving, wise parent w T ith his 
children. 

Take a common, homely illustration. The 
little boy wants to eat the unripe fruit. 
Why? — Because of the pleasure of eating it. 
The fact is, looking at it in the broadest 
sense, pleasure — happiness — is the universal 
quest of life. With this problem all religions 
and philosophies have to deal. 

Epicurianism teaches its votaries to seek 
pleasure in the fleeting phantoms of the 
passing hour. Stoicism seeks to make men 
indifferent to the desire for happiness — that 

r 59i 



60 GOD IS LOVE. 

is, strange as it may seem, it seeks to make 
men contented or happy without happiness. 
Buddhism teaches that conscious existence is 
misery, and that therefore happiness is unat- 
tainable save in nirvana, or extinction of 
being, by absorption into Deity. 

It is to the honor of Christianity that it 
taught the only possible way to gain this 
universal quest. We are to find it by forget- 
ting it; and we are to forget it for ourselves 
in the eager desire to gain it for those 
around us. Happiness is a coy maiden that 
ever eludes the too-eager grasp of the selfish 
seeker; but when self is forgotten in the 
service of others, the thrilling heart becomes 
conscious of her presence, and the eye, for a 
moment uplifted, rests full on her smiling face. 

But to return to the illustration. The boy 
in his desire to eat the green apple only 
takes into consideration the few minutes it 
takes to eat it. He is forgetful of the future 
in the desire for the present pleasure. The 
father says, "Stop, child; don't eat that ap- 
ple. " Why this prohibition? Is it that the 
father wishes to exercise his authority ? — No. 
The father loves the child. He takes more 
time into consideration than the boy. He 
thinks not only of those few minutes w r hile 
the taste of the apple is in the mouth, but he 
thinks of the morrow of sickness and pain, 
and possible death, and in love he says, 
"Thou shalt not." 



NATURE OF THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT. 61 

Suppose the child is caught again eating 
the fruit. The father says to him, "Johnnie, 
if you eat another one of these apples, I shall 
whip you. ' ' Why is this ? Is the father 
angry with the child ? and does he propose 
to retaliate by whipping? — Ah, no! He says 
in his heart: "The boy does not fully un- 
derstand my reason for refusing him that 
coveted pleasure; but he must not eat that 
fruit, it will kill him. I will give him a mo- 
tive for refraining that he will understand." 

All this is love on the part of the parent. 
To the child at the time it may seem arbi- 
trary and hard, but when he comes to look 
at it from the standpoint of the father and 
to know why he forbade, he will thank and 
love him for the prohibition. 

This is also the way God is dealing with us. 
We are children down here in the darkness. 
We see only such a little way, enshrouded as 
we are with these shadows. Our life, looked at 
with other than the eye of faith, " is a narrow 
vale between the cold and barren peaks of 
two extremities." "We strive in vain to look 
beyond the heights." At the best, in the 
beginning we only take into consideration 
this little life, bounded by the narrow span 
between the waking and the sleeping. 

But this is only the today of our existence. 
The tomorrow — ah, that tomorrow ! how in 
God's sight it opens out for us into the great 
deep sea of eternity ! Eternity ! who can tell 



62 GOD IS LOVE. 

us what it holds for us ? for it, too, comes 
from a Father's loving hand, and brims with 
his blessings. What possibilities of pleasure 
are here, o'ertopping our highest dream! 
"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
have entered into the heart of man, the 
things which God hath prepared for them 
that love him. " 

But all these possibilities of the tomorrow 
depend upon the right use of the today. God 
sees the end from the beginning. He knows 
what he has for us in those dim distances be- 
yond the utmost reach of our vision. He sees 
the ages rising before us, and us rising to 
meet them, with ever-increased capacity for 
happiness, and yet that capacity ever full to 
overflowing. God knows the only path that 
leads that way, and that is the path of right- 
eousness. He says in love, "This way, my 
child, this way." 

Broad and many are the ways that lead to 
death. How often, caught by the glare of 
some present promise of pleasure, we turn 
aside into some of these paths, only to hear 
the Father say, "Thou shalt not, my child, 
thou shalt not!" If on what seems to be the 
sunny slope of sensual and selfish indulgence 
we ever see the sign set up, "No Trespassing 
Here," the Father's hand set it there to turn 
us back into the path that leads to the source 
of the sunshine. 



NATURE OF THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT. 63 

Satan would ever tempt us to forget the 
future, with its boundless possibilities, in the 
pursuit of the fickle present, with its fleeting 
joys. He never raises the crystal goblet of 
bliss to the human lip but to dash it at the 
feet as soon as a single drop is quaffed, and 
then he stands pointing at the broken frag- 
ments with a fiendish laugh. All the baits 
with which he tempts the soul to sin are but 
the fabled bag of gold at the end of the bow 
of promise. As we pursue, the bow recedes 
before us, and finally it vanishes out of sight 
in the blackness of the coming storm, and 
even the promise of pleasure is gone. 

Thus men forsake the Lord, the only true 
fountain of living water, to follow some tempt- 
ing mirage into the desert. On and on they 
go, unmindful of the lengthening shadows, 
stimulated ever by a thirst which only the 
living water can satisfy, and by which God 
intended to lead them to him. By and by the 
mirage itself vanishes with the setting sun, 
and the soul finds itself alone in the gathering 
darkness, surrounded only by the barren sands 
of a misspent life. 

Hear the testimony of one who had traveled 
this way to the very verge of the precipice 
of despair, catching at each new promise, and 
trusting last of all only to the solace of 
human affection. As this last object of his 
hope and trust was slipping from his grasp, 



64 GOD IS LOVE. 

irresistibly drawn by the cruel clutch of con- 
sumption, he breaks forth into this plaint: — 

" What is our love with its tincture of lust, 

Its pleasures that pain us, its pain that endears, 
But joy in an armful of beautiful dust, 
That crumbles and flies on the wings of the years." 

God would not have us trust to these fleet- 
ing pleasures. All that there is of true 
happiness, even here, comes from him. 1 His 
law reveals those principles, obedience to 
which makes happiness possible both here 
and hereafter. He is ever seeking to per- 
suade us to live and act, not in the todays 
and tomorrows as they come and go, but in 
eternity with him. 

His law is the highway of holiness over 
which the ransomed shall walk when they re- 
turn and come to Zion with songs and ever- 
lasting joy, to obtain joy and gladness, while 
sorrow and sighing flee away. It is to turn 
us into this way that he in love afflicts us 
here. Once in this way, the path rises and 
broadens before us, reaching upward through 
limitless vistas, till lost in the glory that 
surrounds the throne. 

Herbert Spencer, in his "Data of Ethics," 
says that the basis of ethical distinctions is 
not the revealed will of God. Man does not 
need any such revelation. He can through 
experience evolve his own law. Then he 
goes on to show that every right principle is 
right because it tends to the happiness of all 



NATURE OP THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT. 65 

created intelligent beings, and that every 
wrong principle is wrong because it tends to 
their misery. In this he thinks he has done 
away with the need for a revelation of the 
divine will; and as he fancies there is no 
need, so he denies the fact of such a reve- 
lation. 

Who does not see that his logic, instead of 
denying the need for such a revelation, simply 
lifts that revelation above the realm of mere 
arbitrary decree, into the region of fatherly 
love? True, the boy, if lie did not die of the 
cholera morbus, might through much pain have 
discovered that eating unripe fruit did not 
tend to happiness. The father's love would 
save him that misery. If there was no tempt- 
ing devil, man through countless ages of suf- 
fering, and when generation after generation 
had been hopelessly lost without ever having 
discovered the right way, — man might at last 
rise to something of a knowledge of these 
principles on which happiness depends, and 
so " evolve his own law." But even then he 
would find himself so bound by the chains of 
evil habits already contracted, that the good 
he would do, he could not; and so even then he 
would need the Saviour, and the divine reve- 
lation of him. 

God, in the revelation of his law, would 
save man all this, and give to the first man 
an equal chance of happiness and eternal life 
with that last man, which a science falsely so 

5 



66 GOD IS LOVE. 

called ever babbles of as the hope of coming 
ages, the crown of evolution. 

Yes, God's way is ever the best, for his 
way is love's own. The Father's love is 
not satisfied with making happiness possible 
merely to the race, after ages of misery and 
suffering, but to the individual as well, and 
brings the possibility of endless happiness to 
every hungering heart. This is the ' ' why ' ' 
for God's law. This is why he gave it to 
Adam in the beginning. This "why," like 
the reason for everything God does, is simply 
love, for God is love. 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 



"0 marvelous credulity of man! 

If Gcd indeed kept secret, could'st thou know 
Or follow up the mighty Artisan 
Unless he willed it bo?"— Jean Ingelow. 

It has been said that we should be satisfied 
to know what God says, ivhat he does, and 
what he commands, without asking why. This 
last, it is thought, would be but to pry im- 
piously into the secrets of God, and seek to 
fathom his motives. The reply is that the 
whole life of Christ and the whole inspired 
word is a revelation of the motive of God ; 
and John condenses all this revelation into 
one word when he says, "God is love." 

We may know a man's acts to a certain 
degree, and yet really know nothing of the 
man. Only as we know the motives which 
underlie these acts do we know him. 

This is as true of God as of man. But God 
has invited us to know him; he has sought 
to reveal himself to us through Jesus Christ; 
and he has told us that in him are all the 
treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Jesus 
himself said,- "This is life eternal, that they 

[67] 



68 GOD IS LOVE. 

might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ, whom thou hast sent. ' ' So this little 
book is a humble effort to look underneath 
the "what," and discover something of the 
"why" of God's deeds and words. 

It is true this is holy ground, where one 
needs to walk, as did one of old, with bared 
feet and uncovered head. It is true, too, that 
it is a mystery into which the angels desire 
to look ; but it is not a mystery because God 
is hiding it from us, but rather because it is 
the mystery of a love that passeth knowledge. 
Here are depths and heights and lengths and 
breadths that eternity will not be long enough 
for us to fully fathom, yet even now we may 
know them by faith. Certain it is that if 
God w r ishes to keep secret on any point, we 
shall have no fear of finding him out; but 
he is the Fountain of Life, and he has said 
that w r hosoever will may come and take freely. 

The child knows full well that when he can 
see the love in the father's command, it is 
much easier to obey; so when the same di- 
vine love that dictated God's commands gets 
into our hearts, we shall know, with John, 
that "this is the love of God, that w^e keep 
his commandments ; and his commandments 
are not grievous." 

"Thou shalt have no other gods before 
me." Why this prohibition? It is true that 
God is our Creator, and that to him is due 
our supreme love and worship. . It is true 



THE LAW OP LOVE. 69 

that he has a right to command it, and that 
we ought to yield it because he commands it. 
That right to command our love and worship 
rests, however, on his love to us, of which 
love this very command is a manifestation. 
Is there no higher reason here than that 
God, having a desire to be loved and wor- 
shiped, and having a right to our love and 
worship, commands it ? 

We might pause and ask why he desires 
our love. It is only love that longs for love. 
The heart that yearns with inexpressible ten- 
derness over another, finds its own love the 
true measure of its longing for return of love. 
God's language to Israel, as they broke this 
precept, was ever that of wounded love. "My 
covenant they brake, although I was an hus- 
band unto them, saith the Lord." "Turn, O 
backsliding children, saith the Lord ; for I 
am married unto you." "Surely as a wife 
treacherously departeth from her husband, so 
have ye dealt treacherously with me, O house 
of Israel, saith the Lord." All these expres- 
sions reveal the yearning love of God that 
underlies this precept. It is the longing of 
true love for the supreme affections of the 
object loved. 

But there is a deeper and broader meaning 
here than this. Just as the happiness of the 
family depends upon their devotion to one an- 
other, so with the universal family of which 
we have spoken. When gazing upon the full 



70 GOD IS LOVE. 

moon sailing the upper sky and shedding its 
mellow light upon all around, have you never 
thought that some friend, though thousands 
of miles away, might at that instant also be 
looking on the same object? and was not the 
thought a mysterious cord to draw your 
hearts nearer together, in spite of the dis- 
tance and the darkness ? So the supreme 
look of love cast by each upon the one God 
was to draw the hearts of humanity nearer 
together, and hold them in happy unity. 

When canvassing once in Western Iowa, 
the writer entered a house and began to 
exhibit his book. He had not proceeded far 
when the following conversation took place. 
The gentleman of the house, noticing some- 
thing peculiar in his accent, said : — 

"You are a Yankee, aren't you?" 

' ' Yes ; did you discover it from my speech ? ' ' 

1 ' Yes ; what State are you from ? ' ' 

"New Hampshire. " 

"Is that so? What county ?" 

' ' Hillsborough county. ' ' 

U I icant to knoiv! , Did you ever become ac- 
quainted with a man by the name of Hanson, 
who lives on the old Horace Greeley farm up 
in Amherst?" 

"Yes; he is a friend of mine. I took din- 
ner with him there at the old log house not 
long before I came West. ' ' 

He rose from his seat, and extending his 
hand, which I grasped, while his lips quiv- 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 71 

ered, and the tears ran down his face, he 
said : — 

1 ' That man is my brother. I have not seen 
him for thirty years. Wife, is not dinner most 
ready ? I will take that book, Mr. Fifield, 
and you must stay with us to dinner. ' ' 

I was a perfect stranger to that man, yet 
he treated me as a brother. He wanted me 
to stay with him a week, and come and see 
him when I could. What made us acquainted 
at once and united our hearts ? We had a 
common object of affection, and each knowing 
and loving the same person, we knew and 
loved each other. So by uniting all men in 
the loving worship of one Father, God would 
make them all one happy family of brothers 
and sisters. 

Illustrating this, there is a little story of a 
poor street waif who was admitted one cold 
morning into the back door of a house by a 
minister, who gave him a very small and very 
dry crust of bread, and then began to ques- 
tion him. The boy was very ignorant, and so 
the minister began to tell him about God. 
He said that God was the Creator, that he 
made all things, and that he lived in heaven. 
The boy, in his hunger, tried to eat the crust, 
hardly noticing what was said. Finally the 
minister made the casual remark that God 
was our Father. This caught the boy's atten- 
tion. Said he, "Is he your Father?'' The 
minister said, "Yes. " "Is he my Father?" 



72 GOD IS LOVE. 

Again the minister said, "Yes. " The boy 
thought a moment, then said, "You and me 
are brothers, are'nt we?" Reluctantly the 
minister said, "Yes." Then said the boy, 
"Are'nt you ashamed to give me such a dry 
crust of bread ? ' ' 

This story, simple as it is, may bring con- 
viction and condemnation to many of us. 
Have we cherished the grace of brotherly 
kindness for all ? Have we, in owning G-od 
as our Father, felt our relation and our duty 
to all his children? This little story carries 
the principle of the first precept in it; and in 
brief, of all the ten, for they are all included 
in the fatherhood of God and the brother- 
hood of man. The breaking of this precept 
has led to the worship of different gods. 
This has divided the world up into different 
families and different nations, each having its 
own gods, and each saying that the gods of 
the other nations were no gods, each owning 
its brotherhood to its own little tribe, or clan, 
but denying it to all others. Thus the world 
has been filled with war and bloodshed. Men 
have fought because they were jealous for the 
preeminence and supremacy of their gods ; and 
so the very gods whom their fears and super- 
stitions created, have taken part in the de- 
struction of human life. 

It is not too much to say that more misery 
has been caused by the direct violation of 
this commandment than by everything else. 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 73 

Indeed, when we come to remember that the 
other nine commandments are only special di- 
rections for the observance of the two princi- 
ples contained in this precept, we shall then 
see that all sin, and therefore all misery, is 
the result of the violation of this command- 
ment. 

God knew in the beginning the inevitable 
result to his children of such dejDarture from 
him. There was no selfishness in the love 
that said, "Thou shalt have no other gods 
before me. ' ' It was Jesus Christ who took 
up this precept and taught us to say, "Our 
Father which art in heaven. ' ' He would re- 
alize in the church what would have been 
realized in the world if it had not been for 
sin. To that church he said, "Call no man 
your father upon the earth ; for one is your 
Father, which is in heaven. " "Be not ye 
called Rabbi; for one is your Master, even 
Christ; and all ye are brethren." 

With our divine Lord, God was always 
"our Father," — a Father who delighted to 
give good gifts to his children, — a Father 
who fed the raven, and clothed the lily with 
beauty, and without whom not a sparrow fell 
to the ground. Jesus' whole life was an il- 
lustration of this precept. To him all men 
were brothers, and he sought to bring them 
to a recognition of that brotherhood. Though 
he came from the unspeakable glory that he 
had with the Father before the worlds were, 



74 GOD TS LOVE. 

yet he stooped to our needs, and was not 
ashamed to call us brethren. 

O that we all might be like him ; then would 
we be able to lead hungry-hearted, world- 
weary men and women to Jesus, that mani- 
festation of divine love, where, born again of 
the one Father, they might indeed become 
members of the one true brotherhood ! O 
that we might realize this brotherhood more 
fully now in our churches, so that the sympa- 
thetic response of heart to heart might ever 
spare a tear for one another's sorrow, and a 
smile for one another's joy ! Then would our 
hearts not be, of necessity, locked up with 
sorrow's slow fire, smoldering in the dark- 
ness ; but, even here, as He designed, there 
might be an image of heaven upon earth, — a 
place where we could meet, not merely face 
to face, but also heart to heart, and know as 
we are known. The love that would give 
us this joy is revealed in the first principle 
of the decalogue and illustrated in the life of 
Jesus Christ. 

The "why" of that command is love, for 
" God is love" 



CHAPTER X. 



THE TWO WAYS. 



''Enter ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate, and broad is 
the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in 
thereat*: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which 
leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.-' — Matt. 7: 13, 14. 

Having seen that the observance of the 
first precept of the decalogue is absolutely 
indispensable to the happiness of intelligent 
beings, we shall also see the same of all the 
others. In fact, the remaining three com- 
mands of the first table are only guards 
against the departure from the loving worship 
of the one Father ; and the six precepts of 
the last table are indispensable directions for 
preserving the harmonious unity of the one 
brotherhood. 

But who is this one Father ? — He is the 
Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things. 
Any departure, therefore, from his worship to 
that of another god can be nothing else than 
the leaving of the Creator for the created, a 
forgetting of the worker in a false admiration 
for the work. 

Every work begins in the mind of the 
worker. However great and wonderful it may 

[75] 



76 GOD IS LOVE. 

be, it is only a revelation of that mind which, 
being capable of conceiving and executing 
such a work, is more wonderful still. AH 
true appreciation of the works of God finds 
these works, in their infinite variety and 
beauty, but a golden and glorified stairway, 
over which, mounting breathlessly, the mind 
pauses not till, at the top, surcharged w r ith 
inexpressible wondering approbation, it breaks 
forth into the ceaseless, "Holy, holy, holy, 
Lord God Almighty ! ' : " Thou art worthy, 
O Lord, to receive glory and honor and 
power; for thou hast created all things, 
and for thy pleasure they are and were crea- 
ted. ' - All idolatry is a pausing somewhere in 
this ascent, to give the supreme adoration and 
love to some passing object, instead of mount- 
ing upward to him. 

Then, there are not only the works of God, 
but the works of Satan, which are simply a 
defacement of the works of God, Satan him- 
self being the chief deformity. From the 
point in the ascent godward where the mind 
pauses, refusing to ascend higher, Satan leads 
it from the admiration of the pure works of 
God to that of his own deformed w r orks, and 
then gradually downward to him. 

The second and fourth precepts of the 
decalogue were designed to be safe barriers 
against this sin. The Sabbath was a w T eekly 
memorial that the only true God, the only one 
worthy of w T orship, w T as the Creator of all 



THE TWO WAYS. H 

things. " Remember the Sabbath day to keep 
it holy. ' ' Why ? — " For in six days the Lord 
made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that 
in them is, and rested the seventh day ; 
wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, 
and hallowed it. ' ' 

Wherever in the Bible the object of the 
writer is to distinguish between false gods 
and the true God, this fact is alluded to. 
Paul says, "Every house is builded by some 
man ; but he that built all things is God. ' ' 
Jeremiah says, "The gods that have not made 
the heavens and the earth, even they shall 
perish from the earth, and from under these 
heavens. He hath made the earth by his 
power, he hath established the world by his 
wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens 
by his discretion.'' 

To the Athenian idolaters, who, fearing they 
might overlook the worship of some deity and 
so incur his wrath, had erected an altar with 
this inscription, ' ' To the Unknown God, ' ' Paul 
said, "Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, 
him declare I unto you. God that made the 
world and all things therein." 

It is a wonderful fact that the heathen na- 
tions have almost always admitted that their 
gods were part of the creation, and that they 
have had a shadowy idea of another God 
back of them, and above them, who was the 
Creator. If men had always kept the Sab- 
bath in the true spirit of it, this false worship 



78 GOD IS LOVE. 

would have been impossible. Every week all 
men would have commemorated the fact that 
the only true God and Father of all was the 
Creator. Thus they would have continued in 
the worship of the one God, the one Father. 
It was to be a day for all minds to mount to- 
gether that golden stairway, and find joyous 
communion together in him. Says the psalm- 
ist, in that song for the Sabbath day : "Thou, 
Lord, hast made me glad through thy work, I 
will triumph in the works of thy hands. O 
Lord, how great are thy works ! and thy 
thoughts are very deep. ' ' This is the true 
spirit of the Sabbath day, — a day to forget 
the world and its cares, while soul with soul 
we soar to breathe the pure air of the heav- 
enly heights. 

There have ever been but two pathways, — 
the straight and narrow, leading upward ; and 
the broad way, leading downward. When men 
worship the Creator, his work lies all around 
them, to show that he is higher than their 
highest dream of him. 

There is an infinity in every sun and star 
and world, in every leaf and plant and flower, 
which man cannot comprehend. If the mind 
cannot fathom the work, how can it fathom 
the worker ? How can it do other than say 
in humble devotion, "Great and marvelous 
are thy works, Lord , God Almighty ? " It 
must remember that its highest ideal of him 
is still only an ideal, and that God is far 



THE TWO WAYS. 79 

higher and grander. As by beholding we be- 
come changed into his likeness, till we attain 
near to that ideal, we can now build that ideal 
higher and truer. And so the soul plumes it- 
self for another flight, ever upward, upward, 
from faith to faith, from glory to glory, till, 
lost in the limitless glorified distance, we are 
perfectly transformed into his image. 

As thus we become sanctified through his 
truth, we not only become one with him, but 
one with each other. " Sanctify them through 
thy truth ; . that they all may be one ; 

as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that 
they also may be one in us." These are the 
words of Jesus, and this is the spirit and 
object of all true worship. The nearer we 
come to him, the nearer we come to each 
other; the more we own him as our Father, 
the more we own each other as brethren and 
sisters, till, when the work is completed, Jesus 
says, "At that day ye shall know that I am 
in my Father, and ye in me, and I in yon. " 

Ah, what blissful unity ? This is the path- 
way that leads upward, in ever - increasing 
happiness, to God. This is why the Father 
said of this way, "Thou shalt. " The "why" 
was love, for God is love. 

But there is another pathway in which men 
have always been prone to walk. They have 
worshiped and served the creature more than 
the Creator. They have not only paused, in 
the ascent, to worship the created, but they 



80 GOD IS LOVE. 

have symbolized the created by the works of 
their own hands, and then worshiped their 
own ideal as thus represented. Thus they 
first refused to glorify God as God, by believ- 
ing him to be still higher and better than 
their present conception of him, and so walk- 
ing onward and upward in the opening light 
of his truth. On the contrary, by professing 
themselves to be too wise thus to walk, they 
did what men always do when they write out 
their creed, — they said in their hearts, "He 
is no higher than our present knowledge of 
him ; ' ' and so they became fools by changing 
the glory of the incorruptible God into an 
image made first like to corruptible man, then 
to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping 
things, down, down, to that old serpent him- 
self, which is the devil and Satan. 

Thus Satan was put in the place of God; 
and men, by worshiping, instead of being led 
upward to unity in him, were led downward 
into all deformity and strife, hateful and 
hating one another, till every man's hand was 
against his neighbor, and the imagination of 
the thoughts of men's hearts was evil and 
only evil continually. This was the down- 
ward road that led to misery and death. God 
foreknew the result of every course of action. 
This is why he said in the second command- 
ment of this course, "Thou shalt not. " The 
"why" was love, for God is love. 



THE TWO WAYS. 81 

For the same reason the third precept of 
the decalogue enjoins a reverential use of the 
name of God, that this sacred name may ever 
have a mysterious power to beget within us 
higher and truer conceptions of the object 
named, thus lifting us up to unity with him 
and with each other. Between these two 
paths, the one leading ever upward to limit- 
less heights of life and joy and glory, the 
other downward through darkness to death, 
God placed the institution of the Sabbath. 
Its object was to obstruct the way of the 
downward path, and to turn men's feet into 
the upward way. 

By this can be seen the malignant design 
of Satan in plucking that institution from its 
place and putting a false one in its stead. 
Just as the true Sabbath is a memorial of the 
power of the Creator to lift us ever upward 
to him, so the false sabbath is a symbol of 
the power of the created (of him who thought 
in it to exalt himself above all that is called 
God or that is worshiped) to drag us ever 
downward to death. 

Which way shall we go, the way of love 
and light and glory, or the way of darkness, 
discord, and death ? 



CHAPTER XI. 



THE DESIGN OF THE LAW. 



"Wide as the world is thy command, 
Vast as eternity thy love : 
Firm as a rock thy truth shall stand, 
When rolling years shall cease to move.'' 

— Isaac Watts. 

The first table of the law was designed, by 
keeping men in the worship of the one God 
and Father, to unite them in one family and 
lift them ever higher and higher, into the 
realization of all possible joy and peace. 

The second table of the law was written by 
the same finger, and came from the heart of 
the same loving Father. It is simply his 
statement of the few brief principles which 
underlie all possible family unity and happi- 
ness in the relation of man with man. This 
is too apparent to need any argument. Even 
the civil law enforces, to some extent, the 
outward observance of the letter of these pre- 
cepts as the basis of civil society. Upon such 
outward observance civil society rests, and 
without it the whole social fabric would 
crumble. 

The difference between civilization and ab- 
solute savagery of the worst type is merely a 

[82] 



THE DESIGN OP THE LAW. 83 

difference made possible by such outward ob- 
servance. When the majority of the people, 
of their own free will, at least outwardly, ob- 
serve these commandments, and, combining 
together, form an influence strong enough to 
hold the fractious minority in check, then, and 
not till then, civilization is possible. But if 
the vast difference between civilization and 
savagery is due to the outward observance of 
the letter of that law, even that observance 
being forced upon the minority, what can be 
said of the possible joy in that ideal state 
where all, of their own free will, keep not the 
letter only but also the spirit of the law ? 
What blissful friendships, what perfect se- 
curity and confidence in all ! Indeed, the in- 
habitants of that country might "dwell safely 
in the wilderness, and sleep in the woods." 
In just so much as we rise above the mere 
outward observance into the spiritual, are we 
lifted above the purely civil into the Christian. 
It was through Jesus Christ that the Holy 
Spirit was given to us, to write the law, not 
merely in the letter, and on tables of stone, 
but in the spirit, and on the fleshly tables of 
the heart. In all this God had not only his 
own pleasure but the happiness of his chil- 
dren in view. The two were identical, for 
God is love. I repeat : The highest possible 
pleasure of God is identical with the highest 
possible happiness of all his creatures. The 
happiest family, other things being equal, is 



84 GOD IS LOVE. 

the one which honors father and mother most. 
The writer remembers a few such families, in 
which he has been privileged for a time to 
dwell, — remembers them as oases in the desert 
of life, as bright spots where heaven has in- 
deed come down and touched this earth. If 
obedience to this precept will make one fam- 
ily happy, will it not two ? will it not three ? 
will it not all ? This is why God enjoined it. 

The commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," 
which, in the spirit, means, thou shalt not 
hate, guards the joy of living. 

"Thou shalt not commit adultery," guards 
the sacred joys of the family relation. 

"Thou shalt not steal," guards the right 
and joy of property. 

"Thou shalt not bear false witness." This 
guards the right of property, and the joys of 
friendship and reputation. 

"Thou shalt not covet," forbids the cherish- 
ing of the first germ of the desire that leads 
to all evil and all misery. 

Why, how careful our Father is of us ! how 
desirous for our utmost possible joy ! This is 
love's solicitude. 

Because of the breaking of these precepts 
the world is divided into the poor, with the 
endless o'erwearying struggle for existence; 
and the rich, with the haunting care of un- 
counted gold, — anxiety and unrest in both 
extremes, instead of plenty and pleasure for 
all. Because of the violation of these prin- 



THE DESIGN OF THE LAW. 85 

ciples this world holds for us not one joy 
that is sure, not one hope that may not de- 
ceive, not one pleasure unmated with its 
possible pain. The transgression of these 
commands has made necessary our prisons, 
our insane asylums, and our poorhouses ; it 
has put locks not only on our houses and 
shops, but on our hearts as well. 

How often we are compelled to walk our 
way alone and lonely, though amid the crowd 
and throng of men ! No human eye sees our 
sorrow or sympathizes with our joy ; the 
heart's sacred temple is kept open only for 
phantom footfalls, ourselves the only wor- 
shipers at the shrine of its memories. If, 
perchance, to some trusted friend the outer 
door is left for a moment ajar, it is hastily 
closed and barred, lest some vandal hand 
snatch away, for the vulgar gaze, the picture 
from the wall or the statue from its niche. 

Ah, how different this life we are compelled 
to lead here, because of sin, from that which 
were possible had these principles always 
been the rule of human action ! True, the 
Holy Spirit, if we invite him, will make this 
heart's temple his abode, and even now fill 
and flood it with the light of that other world, 
where all our ideals and aspirations will be 
realized, and more than realized, in him. Still 
the heart will long for human sympathy. 
Did not Jesus in the hour of his drawing 
nearest to God, reach out with human long- 



86 GOD IS LOVE. 

ing for his disciples, and say, "Father, I will 
that they also whom thou hast given me, be 
with me where I am ' ' ? 

The world is living in open disregard of 
the spirit, if not of the letter, of these pre- 
cepts, — living in envy and jealousy, in strife 
and the struggle for vainglory, hateful and 
hating one another. But Jesus Christ says of 
his church, "They are not of the world, even 
as I am not of the world." They have been 
chosen out of the world, to have this law 
written in their hearts, and to walk the high- 
way of holiness with him. That way is the 
way of peace, for Jesus is the Prince of 
Peace. Every step of the way will bring them 
not only nearer to God, but nearer to one 
another. 

Even here the ransomed of the Lord may 
be seen returning, and coming to Zion with 
songs and everlasting joy upon their heads. 
But if sorrows do come, we, too, will bear one 
another's sorrows, and "heart to heart, we'll 
bide the shadows till the mists have rolled 
away." This is the principle that underlies 
the law, — the Father's loving desire for the 
welfare and happiness of his children. Every 
jot and tittle was dictated by love, for "God 
is love." 

Here we have struck a foundation which 
Antinomianism can never touch ; now we know 
why the law can never change ; it is because 
his love never changes. He is the same yes- 



THE DESIGN OF THE LAW. 87 

terday, today, and forever; and he has loved 
us with an everlasting love. Jesus says, "It 
is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than 
one tittle of the law to fail." This is no 
hyperbole; it is the simple statement of a 
fact that we can understand. There was a 
time when heaven and earth did not exist. 
It is conceivable that the time might come 
again when they would not exist. The God 
who made them could destroy them. This is 
thinkable, but it is absolutely unthinkable 
that any world ever did or could exist, peo- 
pled with intelligent beings, where the obedi- 
ence of these principles would not lead to 
joy, and the disobedience of them to misery 
and death. 

It is not thinkable that God could have 
one idea of right in Jupiter, and another in 
Saturn, and another somewhere else. He is 
the same God, not on]y yesterday, today, and 
forever, but, as everywhen in time, so every- 
where in space, from the center of centers to 
the outermost rim of his mighty universe. 
This law is, as John beheld it, under the 
throne, the foundation of his moral govern- 
ment for all his morally accountable creatures. 
As the different States of our Union are ruled 
by the same Federal law from the capitol, so 
all worlds are ruled from his throne. Their 
Sabbath may not agree with ours in absolute 
time, but the principle is the same. He who 
discovered the plan of a flower discovered a 



88 GOD IS LOVE. 

plan which runs through all the floral king- 
dom. There are almost infinite variations, it 
is true, but still the plan is the same. So 
the plan of an animal runs through the whole 
animal kingdom, and on this fact is founded 
the science of comparative anatomy. 

The Bible gives us, in simple language, the 
plan of God in creating worlds, and peopling 
them, and bringing them under his moral gov- 
ernment. There may be variations in detail, 
but the principle is the same. Not even God 
himself could change that law and still be 
God. 

The word "God" means good. God is the 
supreme, all-embracing Good. As in him are 
all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, 
and all true learning is simply finding out 
him; so in him is all goodness, and all be- 
coming good is simply becoming like him. 
The law is a record of God's goodness, of 
God's character; it, therefore, as David says, 
6 ' is perfect, as he is perfect. ' ' When Solomon 
says, "Fear God, and keep his command- 
ments; for this is the whole duty of man," it 
is only another way of saying that the whole 
duty of man is to be like his Maker. The life 
of God, as concerns moral principles, is writ- 
ten in that law, and was lived on earth by 
Jesus Christ. 

As that law is God's will and God's char- 
acter, even he cannot change it without 



THE DESIGN OF THE LAW. 89 

changing himself. But as he includes all 
goodness now, he cannot change himself with- 
out changing to evil. But for God to become 
evil would be for him to cease to be God, for 
the word ' ' God ' ' means good, If God him- 
self should change, and command what he 
has forbidden, and forbid what he has com- 
manded, it would not change the underlying 
tendencies of those precepts to happiness or 
misery. It would change God into the em- 
bodiment of all evil, instead of all good. He 
would then be working for the misery of all 
his children, as now he is for their happiness 
and joy. It would then be true that God was 
hate, as now it is true that God is love. 

The whole argument for the absolute sta- 
bility and perpetuity of God's law rests on 
axiomatic truth. As it is utterly inconceiv- 
able to the human mind that there ever could 
be a world where, or a time when, two and 
two would be five instead of four, so it is un- 
thinkable that there could be a world where, 
or a time when, these principles, if obeyed, 
would not lead to unity and happiness, and 
if disobeyed, to division, discord, misery, and 
strife. They rest upon love, and love never 
faileth. " Whether there be prophecies, they 
shall fail; whether there be tongues, they 
shall cease ; whether there be knowledge, it 
shall vanish away ; ' ' but in the full dawning 
of that brighter day, before which the knowl- 



90 GOD IS LOVE. 

edge of the present shall vanish as the light 
of the candle before the rising sun, love shall 
be the rule of action for all ; and these are 
the principles of love. 



CHAPTER XII. 



HOW MAN MISUNDERSTOOD HIS MAKER. 



"No stream from its source 
Flows seaward, how lonely soever its course, 
But what some land is gladdened. No star ever rose 
And set, without influence somewhere. Who knows 
What earth needs from earth's lowliest creature? No life 
Can be pure in its purpose and strong in its strife, 
And all life not be purer and stronger thereby." 

— Owen Meredith. 

"Our echoes roll from soul to soul. 
And grow forever and forever." — Tennyson. 

There are but two ways in life for men to 
travel, the one leading upward, with ever- 
increasing happiness, to God, the other down- 
ward through darkness to death. The first 
way is the way of God's law. We often hear 
men say when they have done anything 
peculiar, "Well, that is my way." This law 
is God's way. It is the way the angels walk, 
and that is why they are happy. This is the 
law of liberty. It defines the boundaries of 
the rights of every person. Out of this way, 
men have to suffer, not only for their own 
misdeeds, but for the sins of others also, — . 
they not only sin, but are sinned against; in 
this. way they can walk as brothers, in har- 
mony and unity and joy. 

[91] 



92 GOD IS LOVE. 

There is not, and cannot be anywhere in 
the universe, any true happiness except that 
found in walking in this way. This is why 
God in " faithfulness and truth" counseled 
us all to walk in this way, and his counsels 
are " wonderful in wisdom, and excellent in 
working. ' ' 

All this and more David saw when he said, 
' ' Blessed [or happy] are the undefiled in the 
way, who walk in the law of the Lord. ' ' No 
wonder that he prayed, as it is our privilege 
also to pray : ' ' Teach me, O Lord, the way 
of. thy statutes; and I shall keep it unto 
the end. ' ' ' ' Make me to go in the path of thy 
commandments ; for therein do I delight. ' ' 

All turning aside from this way is following 
the counsels of the ungodly to sorrow and 
death. It was thus our first parents followed 
the counsels of Satan; and the race, which 
might have mounted, ere this, to unspeakable 
heights of glory and joy, has gone the down- 
ward way into misery and pain. It is not 
that God stands up above, and with arbitrary, 
vengeful hand pours down his wrath in misery 
upon the sinning; but it is the turning away 
of the simple that slays them. They simply 
' ' eat of the fruit of their own way, ' ' and this 
because they " would none" of God's coun- 
sels, and despised his reproofs. 1 

This is the one point that Satan has ever 
sought to hide from our eyes, that he might 
hasten us in the downward way. He has 



HOW MAN MISUNDERSTOOD HIS MAKER. 93 

always beguiled us with the promise of pleas- 
ure, but the following of his counsels brought 
only pain. Then, pointing to the misery that 
resulted from our own actions, he said, "See, 
God is angry and vengeful, or he would not 
suffer this to come upon you." 

It may be that our sorrow is not the result 
of our own sin, but of the sins of those 
around us. Man is not a solitary, but a social 
being. "None of us liveth to himself, and no 
man dieth to himself," Paul says; and in this 
there are depths of philosophy. The most 
selfish man lives to himself no more than the 
most unselfish ; the difference is only in the 
nature of his influence on those around him. 
One life is a blessing and a benediction, the 
other a constant menace and curse. A stone 
thrown into a lake causes a series of con- 
stantly multiplying and enlarging circles. 
They may become invisible to us after a 
while, but if our eyesight were only perfect 
enough, we should discover that they ceased 
not till they rippled the waters against the 
farthermost shore. 

The Bible often represents the mass of hu- 
manity as a lake or sea of waters. Every 
man's life is a bubble plunged into this 
ocean. For good or ill, for joy or sorrow, its 
influence rolls from soul to soul in ever- 
broadening circles, that cease not till the 
outermost marge of human life is reached. 
We do not, we cannot, live and think and act 



04 GOD IS LOVE. 

alone. We are parts of a great whole, and 
our life affects all life. 

Herein is the terrible injustice of evil. It 
was not Jesus alone that suffered, the inno- 
cent for the guilty. We all have to bear the 
sins and sorrows of those around us. God 
knew r this when in love he pointed out the 
right w r ay. Satan knew it when in malignant 
hatred of God he led men into the dow r nward 
path. Now, watching, he discovers some 
poor innocent soul suffering in agony the 
result of the sins of those around him. The 
sorrowing heart seeks to rise in trembling 
faith to the consolation of the consciousness 
that God is love. But Satan whispers, "What 
have you done that you suffer so ? How un- 
just it is in God to permit this ? Surely he 
cannot love you, or this would not be. ' ' Thus 
Satan ever charges up to God the results 
that have come to men from rejecting God's 
counsel. No wonder James charges us : " Do 
not err, my beloved brethren. Every good 
gift and every perfect gift is from above, 
and cometh down from the Father of lights, 
with whom is no variableness, neither shadow 
of turning. ' ' 

Satan h^s always been leading men to err 
here, and thus he has blinded them to God's 
love, and begotten within them hatred to God, 
instead of love. We have seen that love to 
God, the one Father, includes love to men, 
his children, and is therefore the fulfilling of 



HOW MAN MISUNDERSTOOD HIS MAKER. 95 

the whole law. So hatred to God includes 
hatred to all his creatures, and is the break- 
ing of the whole law. Through sin came sor- 
row and death upon all. Through sorrow 
and suffering came the idea that God is angry, 
and is punishing us unjustly, the innocent 
with the guilty. 

Thus there came into the human heart 
hatred instead of love. But hatred leads to 
more sin, — in fact, to the breaking of every 
precept of the divine law. So, through 
hatred came more sin, and through sin more 
suffering, and through suffering more hatred, 
and through hatred more sin; and the world 
went on spinning down the dark circle of 
ever - increasing hatred, and increasing sin, 
and increasing misery, hateful and hating one 
another, every man's hand against his neigh- 
bor, the imaginations of their thoughts only 
evil, and evil continually. This is the cumu- 
lative downward tendency of sin. 

Besides, through sin came an evil heredity. 
Men were born with the tendency to think 
wrong and do wrong. Through this came 
next an evil environment, exerting its influ- 
ence for evil upon the child from his earli- 
est conscious moments. Thus every deeper 
plunge of the soul into sin brought a worse 
heredity, and this brought a worse environ- 
ment, and these brought more sin to lower 
still farther the standard of both the heredity 



96 GOD IS LOVE. 

and the environment. Ah, this was the down- 
ward w r ay to death ! 

And Satan w T as all the w T hile charging all 
this misery to God's forgetfulness of us, or 
to his hatred and wrath. What wonder men 
lost the knowledge of the true God ! What 
wonder they lowered him ever downward to 
the embodiment of all evil, instead of all 
good, thus putting the devil in the place of 
God ! And so they did, for all paganism 
was in part devil-worship. Paul says, "The 
things w T hich the Gentiles sacrifice, they sac- 
rifice to devils, and not to God. ' ' Thus men 
were estranged from God. Not that God 
ceased to love them, but they ceased to love 
God; and ceasing to love the one Father, 
they ceased to love one another. Sin built 
up a high wall, or partition, between man 
and God, and between man and man. 

God does not need to be reconciled to man, 
for, like the mother's love, his love ever fol- 
lows us, even when we are in the downward 
way, seeking to bring us back to him. But 
man needs to be reconciled to God. In some 
way there must be an atonement made. Not 
that God's wrath must be satisfied, so that he 
will look with favor upon offending man, but 
that God's love must be so manifest, in spite 
of the existence of suffering and sin, that 
men will turn their hearts toward him, as the 
flower toward the sun. The power of the sun 
to w r arm the earth after the night of storm is 



HOW MAN MISUNDERSTOOD HIS MAKER. 97 

its power to shine away the mists and the 
darkness, so that men may behold its glorious 
face. So the power of God to warm the hard, 
cold hearts of men into new love and life is 
his power to shine away the almost impen- 
etrable mist and darkness that sin has cast 
around his character, so that men may see 
him as he is, and know that God is love. 

This is the work of Christ, the Sun of 
Righteousness. How he accomplishes it I 
shall seek to show in succeeding chapters. 
Let us praise him here, that his love forsook 
us not when we were wandering from him; 
but even while we were dead in sins, for his 
great love wherewith he loved us, he quick- 
ened us together with Christ, that by this 
manifestation of his unmerited favor we might 
be saved. 

" God so loved the ivorld." The word " world" 
here is cosmos, which means order, harmony, 
arrangement. But the world was out of 
order, and out of harmony, almost a chaos 
instead of a cosmos. God created the world 
for his pleasure, for his glory ; but we had 
all sinned and come short of the glory of 
God. His high ideal was still unrealized in 
us. Anything short of divine love would 
have left us to our fate, — the hopeless de- 
struction of the culminating downward tend- 
encies of misery and sin. 

Here God's love looked at us, not as we 

were, but as we were capable of becoming. 

r 



98 GOD IS LOVE. 

He beheld us, not in the darkness of the 
present sin, but in the glorious light of the 
possible future. Underneath the chaos he be- 
held the cosmos, — every creature in blessed 
unity saying, " Blessing, and honor, and glory, 
and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the 
throne, and unto the Lamb forever and ever." 
His love clung to us still, and gave his Son 
to bring out this possibility within us. Of 
this Paul speaks when he says, "I reckon 
that the sufferings of this present time are 
not worthy to be compared with the glory 
which shall be revealed in us." 

What is this love of God but the father and 
mother love that ever follows the wayward 
child in all his wanderings, — follows him 
though the world has forsaken him and cast 
him off, ever believing in some possible 
future for him that the world sees not, and 
ever seeking, with almost infinite love and 
longing, to bring out that possible within 
him ? This is what God means when he says, 
The mother may forget her child, but I will 
not forget you. 

How comforting to know that he looks at 
us now ever thus, beholding not our sins and 
the chaos of human passions and of selfish- 
ness that reigns within, but beholding still 
the ideal beauty of character for which he 
made us, and which he ever seeks to bring- 
out within us ! Ah ! this is love, for God is 
love ! As he said to the storm-tossed sea, so 



HOW MAN MISUNDERSTOOD HIS MAKER. 99 

to the passion-tossed soul Jesus waits, and 
waits in love, to say, "Peace, be still," — only 
waits the lifted eye of faith and trust that 
cries, "Master, carest thou not that we per- 
ish?" 



CHAPTER XIII 



THE ATONEMENT, 



"For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named." 
—Paul. 

The word " atonement " means at-one-ment. 
Sin had brought misery, and misery had 
brought a misunderstanding of God's charac- 
ter. Thus men had come to hate God in- 
stead of loving him ; and hating him, the one 
Father, men also hated man, their brother. 
Thus, instead of the one family and the one 
Father, men were separated from God and 
from each other, and held apart by hatred 
and selfishness. There must be an atonement. 

An atonement can be made only by God's 
so revealing his love, in spite of sin and sor- 
row, that men's hearts will be touched to 
tenderness ; and they, being delivered from 
Satan's delusions, may see how fully and ter- 
ribly they have misunderstood the divine 
One, and so done despite to the Spirit of his 
grace. Thus they may be led, as returning 
brethren, to come back to the Father's house 
in blissful unity. 

[100] 



THE ATONEMENT. 101 

The atonement is not to appease God's 
wrath, so that man dare come to him, but it 
is to reveal his love, so that they will come 
to him. It was not Christ reconciling God 
unto the world, but God in Christ reconciling 
the world unto himself. It is nowhere said 
that God needed to be reconciled unto us ; he 
says, "I have not forsaken you, but you have 
forsaken me.'" And Paul says, "I beseech 
you in Christ's stead, Be ye reconciled to 
God." It was this question that needed to 
be answered : How can it be that God is our 
Father, and that he is love, when we suffer 
so much, and oftentimes so unjustly, and yet 
no voice breaks the silence, no Father's 
touch soothes our sorrow ? The question was 
to be answered by God, through Christ, 
breaking the silence, and through him heal- 
ing the sick, and raising the dead, prophetic 
of the time when, Satan's power being broken, 
all tears shall be wiped away. 

Thus it was revealed that misery was not 
God's will, the result of his wrath, but that 
it was the devil's will, the result of sin. 
Christ's whole life, from Bethlehem's manger 
to Calvary's cross, was a life of untarnished, 
unadulterated love. But who was Christ? 
The word means " anointed. " He was the 
anointed of God, anointed with God's Spirit 
to live God's life on earth. Said the angel : 
"They shall call his name Emanuel, which 
being interpreted is, God with us." 



102 GOD IS LOVE. 

Ah, yes ! There had been gods enough be- 
fore Jesus came to reveal to a lost world the 
knowledge of the Father. In Egypt it was 
said at one time that it was easier to find a 
god than a man, so numerous were they. 
The trouble was, none of them was "our 
Father. " They were none of them "with 
us." They were all gods afar off in the dis- 
tant and in the dim, and none of them loved 
the human soul. There were gods of war, 
and gods of storm, and gods of lust, and 
theft, and drunken revelings, till every base 
and angry passion of the lost soul was deified 
and worshiped, to drag the soul farther down 
into sin and resultant misery. There was a 
god in the clouds to shoot forth the arrows 
of the angry lightnings ; a god in the ocean 
to toss the waves on high, and wreck the 
ships freighted with human life ; a god in the 
earth to make it tremble with terror, and 
pour forth the lava from the mountain top, 
desolating the cities at its base ; a god every- 
where for wrath and destruction ; a god every- 
where whose wrath must be appeased by 
some bloody sacrifice; a god everywhere, but 
always too far away to be reached by the 
prayers of trembling faith, surging up from 
suffering souls. 

But when Jesus came, he was God with 
us, — with us in sorrow, for he w r as a man of 
sorrows and acquainted with grief ; with us 
in joy, for he, too, rejoiced at the wedding 



THE ATONEMENT. 103 

feast; with us in childhood, for he was a 
child, and even the child's timid prayer can 
reach his heart; with us in youth, for he 
knows all its slippery paths, all its haunting 
fears, that so silently take the place of the 
fleeting phantoms of its high ideals, and high 
hopes unrealized ; with us in poverty, for he 
had not where to lay his head ; with us in 
work and weariness, for he was a carpenter, 
and the son of a carpenter ; with us in perse- 
cution, for he was led as a lamb to the 
slaughter; with us in the sad hour of final 
parting from the loved ones, for did he not 
on the cross say to John, "Behold thy moth- 
er " ? with us w r hen our faith almost fails, for 
did not he, too, say in anguish of spirit, "My 
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 
with us in the dark valley of death, for he 
"likewise took part of the same; that through 
death he might destroy him that had the 
power of death, that is, the devil." Ah, yes! 
he was "Emanuel, which being interpreted 
is, God with us." 

How the devil's falsehoods flee as we be- 
hold God revealed in Jesus Christ ! How the 
estranged soul comes back to its native home, 
and becomes at one with God ! ' ' Yea, the 
sparrow hath found a house, and the swallow 
a nest for herself, where she may lay her 
young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, 
my King, and my God." What wonder that 
the newly created Paul preached to the Athe- 



104 GOD IS LOVE. 

nian idolaters the truth that God is not far 
from every one of us ! He found that out on 
the journey to Damascus, when the light 
shone around him, and a voice said, "Saul, 
Saul, why persecutest thou me?" 

Glimmerings of this same glorious truth 
had been given the faithful in all the past. 
It was thus that Enoch had walked with God. 
It was this that Jacob learned that night in 
Bethel. Was there ever a time when God 
seemed farther away from any human soul 
than from Jacob that night? Driven away 
from home on account of his own and his 
mother's sin, a weary wanderer in the wil- 
derness, no house in sight, the night thick- 
ening around, and only a stone for a pillow, 
the damp earth underneath, and apparently 
only the stars for watchers overhead,— ah ! if 
there was ever a time when God seemed far 
away, and the heart was lonely and desolate, 
and the future all unknown, it was then. But 
God revealed even to the sinful Jacob the 
truth that from every human soul there is a 
ladder reaching to heaven, and that on it the 
angels of God are ascending and descending, 
and that from the top our Father looks lov- 
ingly down on Jiis child with promise and 
benediction. We, too, from the hour of deep- 
est darkness may wake to know that "this is 
none other but the house of God. and this is 
the gate of heaven. ' ' 



THE ATONEMENT. 105 

It was this, too, which Job saw when, amid 
his afflictions, property consumed, health gone, 
forsaken by friends, even his wife urging him 
to curse God and die, yet with magnificent 
faith, that showed how near God was to his 
soul in spite of all the misfortunes of life, he 
said : " I know that my Redeemer liveth, and 
that he shall stand at the latter day upon the 
earth ; and though after my skin worms de- 
stroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see 
God." 

These people, like Abraham, saw before- 
hand Christ's day, and, seeing it, w r ere made 
glad. In Christ thus w r as God's love re- 
vealed in spite of the sorrow that sin has 
brought, — a love that willingly stooped to 
bear our sins and share our sorrows, that he 
might bring us to God; a love that even now 
on the darkest storm cloud paints the bow of 
promise, and that shall yet make the crooked 
straight, and the rough places plain, so that 
all flesh shall see his glory. 

Truly, "he is our peace, who hath made 
both one, and hath broken down the middle 
wall of partition between us, ' ' so that we are 
no longer "strangers and foreigners, but fel- 
low citizens with the saints, and of the house- 
hold of God." He hath made the at-one-ment, 
having reconciled us to God, so that, through 
him, man with man and man with God shall 
yet be brought into blissful unity. And not 
only man with man and man with God, but 



106 GOD IS LOVE. 

in the love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ 
shall all intelligent, morally accountable crea- 
tures find their rallying-point, their rest, and 
universal brotherhood of being, "that in the 
dispensation of the fullness of times he 
might gather together in one all things in 
Christ, both which are in heaven, and which 
are on earth ; even in him, in whom also we 
have obtained an inheritance." 

It is the goodness of God that leads us 
back to the Father's house in repentance. 
This goodness is revealed through Christ; so 
"him hath God exalted . . . to be a Prince 
and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Is- 
rael, and forgiveness of sins." 

The theological world resolves itself into 
two great schools. The first of these is rep- 
resented by so-called orthodoxy, the last, by 
Unitarianism. The first one of these schools 
is always talking about the death of Christ; 
the last, about his life. 

Now it is impossible to dwell too much 
upon the death of Christ; and it is also im- 
possible to linger too lovingly over the mem- 
ory of his life, but the two should not be 
separated in the thought. Nothing earthly 
is more capable of inspiring the soul and 
lifting it to noble endeavor than the self- 
sacrificing, heroic death of the merely human 
hero; but that death is inspiring, becomes 
heroic in fact, only when taken in connection 
with the life, — with the circumstances which 



THE ATONEMENT. 107 

led to the death. So with the death of the 
divine Son of God; it is not the death only, 
but the life also, for Paul says, "If, when we 
were enemies, w r e were reconciled to God by 
the death of his Son, much more, being recon- 
ciled, we shall be saved by his life." 

The death of Christ becomes significant 
only when taken in connection with his life 
of self-sacrifice, wiiich led to and was the 
cause of his death. Only thus does the death 
have power to reveal God's love so as to 
reconcile us to him; and it was during that 
life that God wove in him that perfect, spot- 
less robe of his righteousness which, by faith, 
is first attributed to us and then wrought out 
in us, thus covering and subduing all our 
sins. Let us then ever exalt the life and 
death of the Son of God as the world's hope 
of salvation. It was these that made the 
atonement ; and there is ' ' none other name 
under heaven given among men, whereby we 
must be saved. ' ' 

The first of these theological schools, neg- 
lecting almost entirely and failing to under- 
stand the humanity of Christ, is ever ex- 
claiming, ' ' Ecce Bens ! " ( Behold the God ) ; 
while the last, denying the divinity of Christ, 
takes up the cry, "Ecce homo!" (Behold the 
man.) It seems to the author that both of 
these make a grave, if not fatal mistake. 

With reference to the first I would say, 
God is love. Love, and therefore God, is most 



108 GOD IS LOVE. 

revealed in Jesus Christ when we remember 
that in him, for our good, divinity actually 
took upon itself humanity, with all its weak- 
ness and w r eariness, with all its passions, 
and loves, and longings, and with all its 
temptations. In fact, it is only thus that 
Christ reveals God, and is himself divine, for 
God is love. 

On the other hand, if Jesus was only hu- 
man, and not the divine Son, how did it come 
that his life so transcends all other lives 
ever lived in this w r orld, towering so above 
all men of his time and of all other times, as 
to stand alone, the one center of type and 
memorial, of prophecy and history, of hope 
and faith, for past and coming ages ? If only 
human, how does it reveal other than the 
human? how does it so reveal God as to 
bring the world back to him ? If only human, 
what can it do for the human race, only to 
lift, it may be, the tide of their aspirations 
and longings a little higher without increas- 
ing the power for a possible realization? 
This were but to increase their misery by 
taunting them with impossibilities. It w T ere 
but to hold above them the apple of life, only 
keeping it ever beyond their grasp. Ah, no ! 
this is not like God. Either of these ex- 
tremes is fatal. 

We need simply to believe the Bible record 
of the incarnation. We cannot understand it. 
What have we yet understood of the mystery 



THE ATONEMENT. 109 

of even vegetable and animal life ? Here 
reason fails, and the- most blatant science 
stands dumb, and yet here we believe and 
know. Why should we wonder that the di- 
vine life in Christ, and through him in us, 
should be a mystery ; and why refuse to be- 
lieve in it because it is a mystery ? What 
does the incarnation mean ? — Simply this, 
that God was in Christ, reconciling the world 
unto himself; that Jesus was divine, and yet 
human, perfect God and perfect man, Son of 
God and Son of man ; that with the divine 
arm he might grasp the throne of the Infi- 
nite, while with the human arm he encircles 
humanity, with all its woes and needs, with 
all its hungerings and heartaches, and encir- 
cles it to lift it up, to unite it with God, thus 
making the atonement. 

This, I repeat, like the mystery of the 
lower life, may be beyond our reasonings, 
but it is not unreasonable, for it is like God ; 
for this is love, and "God is love." 



CHAPTER XIV. 



THE ATONEMENT VICARIOUS. 



"Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet 
we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he 
was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniqui- 
ties : the chastisement of our peace was upon him ; and with his 
stripes we are healed. "'— Isa. 53:4, 5. 

After reading the last chapter, some con- 
scientious but timid soul may ask, "Is not 
this denying the vicarious atonement ? " I 
swer, No ; a thousand times no. It is only 
lifting and broadening and enlarging our con- 
ception of the vicarious atonement, and bring- 
ing it into harmony with what we know of 
God's character, as revealed in his work and 
his word. Jesus is still the world's only Sav- 
iour. Both in life and in death he suffered 
vicariously, bearing our griefs and carrying 
our sorrows, — " suffering the Just for the un- 
just, that he might bring us to God," that is, 
that he might make an atonement. 

Christ's death was not the result of an out- 
pouring of the Father's wrath; it was the re- 
sult of the world's violation of the Father's 
law of love. His death was simply the cli- 
max of his life. In every day's labor of love 

[110] 



THE ATONEMENT VICARIOUS. Ill 

he had been giving his life, his very heart 
and soul, to uplift and redeem humanity; but 
the hearts of men were so cold and hard 
through sin that they knew it not. On Cal- 
vary he completed the gift, while the world 
mocked at the foot of the cross. He lived a 
perfectly unselfish life, in a world of sin and 
selfishness; and the world hated him because 
his life showed the selfishness and hypocrisy 
of its own. Paul said that if he preached 
circumcision, he would escape persecution, for 
then would the offense of the cross cease. 
So with Jesus ; if he had turned to the right 
or the left from the straight line of truth, he 
might have escaped the crucifixion. 

The devil and wicked men hate truth, not 
error; nevertheless, it is the truth only that 
can save men. Jesus kept this ever in mind, 
and, constantly saying, "Not my will, but 
thine be done," he was ever loyal to the 
truth, and his life led to his death; the cross 
was at the end of the avenue of self-sacrifice. 
In all this he was only bearing our griefs 
and carrying our sorrows. His life and death 
were like those of the prophets before him 
and the apostles after him, only that in him 
the ideal was reached and realized. Stephen 
said to the Jews: "Ye stiff-necked and un- 
circumcised in heart and ears, ye do always 
resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, 
so do ye. Which of the prophets have not 
your fathers persecuted ? and they have slain 



112 GOD IS LOVE. 

them which showed before of the coming of 
the Just One ; of whom ye have been now the 
betrayers and murderers." Thus, as Jesus in 
his life was in all things made like unto his 
brethren, so in his death he is classed with 
the faithful who had gone before, and those 
who should come after. 

In the parable (Matt. 21:33-41), the house- 
holder sent to his vineyard servant after 
servant; one they beat, another they killed, 
and another they stoned. Finally, he sent 
his own son, and him also they treated like- 
wise, and slew him. As Jesus beheld the 
enormity of their past guilt, and saw what 
the church was to do in the future, in an- 
guish of spirit he exclaimed : " O Jerusalem, 
Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and 
stonest them which are sent unto thee, how 
often would I have gathered thy children 
together, even as a hen gathereth her chick- 
ens under her wings, and ye would not!" It 
is thus every age has persecuted its prophets 
and apostles, leaving posterity to build their 
sepulchers and do them honor. 

All the apostles save one suffered martyr- 
dom, and tradition says of him that he was 
miraculously delivered. When Paul was suf- 
fering the persecution and imprisonment that 
preceded his crucifixion, he wrote of himself 
to the Colossian brethren thus : "I Paul 
. . . now rejoice in my sufferings for you, 
and fill up that which is behind of the af- 



THE ATONEMENT VICARIOUS. 113 

flictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's 
sake, which is the church." When he was 
about to be crucified, he said, "I am now 
ready to be offered. ' ' 

Ah, yes ! we make a great mistake when 
we separate between the life and the death 
of Christ, or the life and the death of the 
Christian, as if they were two different 
things. We lose the consolation of the fact 
that as he was "made perfect through suffer- 
ing," so we, through this same suffering, are 
made one w^ith him. As he was the mystery 
of God, God manifest in the flesh, so Paul 
says, "The riches of the glory of this mys- 
tery ... is Christ in you, the hope of 
glory." (Compare 1 Tim. 3:16 with Col. 1:27.) 

Jesus was innocent. He suffered only for 
the sins of others. All his grief was bearing 
our griefs and carrying our sorrows, and this 
he did that he might bring us to God. We, 
unlike Jesus, have all sinned, and we suffer 
for our own sins and bear our own griefs ; 
but, besides this and beyond this, we, like 
him, suffer for the sins and bear the griefs of 
others. We have not only sinned, but we 
have been sinned against. 

O weary, waiting, anguished soul, has thy 
life been blighted, and thine heart been made 
desolate by that which was not thy fault? 
Have the bright hopes of a buoyant youth 
faded and fallen like the autumn leaves, find- 
ing a grave in thy longing, lonely heart; 



114 GOD IS LOVE. 

and all because another was false when thou 
didst believe him true ? Have fortune and 
friends forsaken thee because of the sin of 
another? Art thou persecuted and despised 
because the world hates what God and thou 
dost love? Hast thou through all this been 
tempted to doubt the justice and love of the 
Divine One? This is not the injustice of 
God. This is the injustice of sin, the in- 
evitable, unavoidable result of the world's 
sin. Even Jesus, the Father's own and only 
begotten Son, when in the world, suffered 
all this. 

Dost thou doubt God's love for thee be- 
cause of this? It is but to doubt God's love 
for him. Rather remember that in this thou, 
if thou trust him, art made one with him, for 
"all things work together for good to them 
that love God." He was led "as a lamb to 
slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers 
is dumb," so he opened not his mouth. Re- 
member if thou too bearest it patiently, and 
for him, thy life also, with his, is presented 
a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, a part 
of the world's great sacrifice for sin. Also 
remember that in this thy life of patient love 
may reach some other life and turn it to him 
for redemption, so that thou too, by and by, 
mayest enter into his joy. Remembering this, 
does not thine heart beat high with new T com- 
fort and hope, and new courage to go bravely 
on and meet life's conflict? 



THE ATONEMENT VICARIOUS. 115 

But, says one, if this is the nature of 
Christ's sacrifice, a living sacrifice as well as 
a dying one, why is the blood always the 
symbol of that sacrifice ? and why is it said 
that without the shedding of blood there is 
no remission ? 

Ah, in this there are depths of meaning ! 
It is because Jesus was true unto the death. 
With him there was no flinching, no turning 
aside, though he beheld the cross at the end 
of the journey. He said, "Father, not my 
will, but thine be done. ' ' His death has 
meaning only when taken as one with his 
life, and his life takes on new glory when 
thus we behold it, as leading to his death. 

He requires us to live that life. He says, 
"If ye love father or mother, or houses, or 
lands, or any earthly treasure, even your own 
life, more than me, ye are not worthy of 
me. I ' If anything, even the cross at the 
end of the pathway we tread, will turn us 
aside from the way, we are not his ; and if 
we are not his, there is no remission. Noth- 
ing but the blood could signify a sacrifice so 
complete. 

Then it is not in death only that the life's 
blood is given. It was Paul who spoke of 
"always bearing about in the body the dying 
of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus 
might be made manifest in our body. ' ' It 
can be manifest in no other way. The heart 
that is broadened and made tender through 



116 GOD IS LOVE. 

suffering, till, like his, it takes in humanity 
with all its needs and all its longings, giving 
unasked sympathy and helpfulness to all, — 
this heart knows what it is to give its life- 
blood daily, to die daily, that the life of 
Christ may be manifest in it. There are 
times when it takes more courage and true 
heroism to live, and live right, than to die. 
The heart, after storm and struggle are over, 
beats quietly toward the close. Yes, Carlyle 
well says, "My brother, the brave man has 
to give his life away. Give it, I advise thee ; 
thou dost not expect to sell thy life in any 
adequate manner ? The ' wages ' of every 
noble work do yet lie in heaven or else no- 
where. " It is a daily giving of the life, such 
as only the shedding of the life's blood can 
signify. This is Christianity. 

And are not His experiences ours ? Behold 
him at the baptism in Jordan. The Spirit 
descends like a dove upon him, and the voice 
is heard saying, "This is my beloved Son, in 
whom I am well pleased. ' ' Surely, we would 
have said, with such a beginning of his mis- 
sion, there is before him only a life of tri- 
umph and joy. But it was from this that he 
was led of the Spirit into the wilderness, to 
be tempted of the devil. 

Do we not remember the joy of our con- 
version, when we consecrated ourselves to 
him, and his sweet forgiveness came into our 
hearts ? Did not the Spirit descend, and was 



THE ATONEMENT VICARIOUS. 117 

not the Father's voice heard, perhaps for the 
first time, saying to our happy souls, "This 
is my beloved son, in whom I am well 
pleased ' ' ? How we almost fancied that the 
struggle was over and the victory gained ! 
Ah ! but have we not since then too often 
found life's pathway a desert, doleful and 
demon-peopled, in which we have wandered 
hungry and weary ? Was it not at the mo- 
ment when our strength had well-nigh failed 
that the devil forsook us at some promise of 
the written word, and some kind angel came 
and ministered unto us ? 

Then life has had its ordinary days of 
service, when from sun to sun we have 
worked in His vineyard. There was the 
morning's freshness, and the noontide heat ? 
and the evening's weariness. There have 
been nights of watching and praying alone 
on some moonlit mountain side. There have 
been days of work that seemed to bring no 
passing reward; and which of us have not 
wept and wondered that, of the ten that were 
healed by our love and care, the nine came 
not back to render due meed of thanks ? 

Perhaps we have felt at times that we too 
had not where to lay our head ; but which of 
us has not had his Bethany home, where he 
might rest for a time, and find loving, grate- 
ful ministration, where the winds of the 
world might blow without, but they touch us 
not there ? We, too, have had times when 



118 GOD IS LOVE. 

with Him we have been transfigured on 
faith's mountain summit. For the time we 
have beheld ourselves, not as we were, but as 
we were capable of becoming. The world, 
with its rush, and roar, and mad ambitions, 
and discordant voices, was far below. Some 
friend might be near who knew us not, or 
only half knew, but we were alone with Him. 
The Father's voice again spake and owned 
us as his, and bright visions of meeting with 
glorified forms came to speak of the future 
kingdom where we too shall reign with him. 
Have we not, or may we not, from this 
mountain summit come down to find our 
Gethsemane and Calvary ; the struggle to 
say, ' ' Thy will be done ; ' ' the doubt that 
said in anguish, "My God, my God, w T hy 
hast thou forsaken me?" — happy if at last 
the unshaken, triumphant faith, that, amid a 
darkened sun and angry lightning's flash 
and rending rocks, said: "It is finished," 
"Father, into thy hands I commend my 
spirit. " 

May we not from his life learn that God's 
love is the one unvarying quantity through 
all these fears and fluctuations, ever the 
same, from everlasting to everlasting ? May 
we not rejoice that through these experiences 
we can be one with Jesus here, and one with 
him hereafter ? It was all this that Paul saw 
when he said: "Not only so, but we glory in 
tribulations also ; knowing that tribulation 



THE ATONEMENT VICARIOUS. 119 

worketh patience; and patience, experience; 
and experience, hope; and hope maketh not 
ashamed; because the love of God is shed 
abroad in our hearts." 



CHAPTER XV, 



MIRACLES AND THEIR MEANING. 



"The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works."— Jesus. 

When it is said that in the incarnation the 
Son of God actually became the Son of man, 
giving us not only his glory and honor, but 
his power as well, and taking in return only 
our poverty and weakness, it is often asked, 
' ' What about miracles ? do they not prove 
that Jesus had, in himself, while here, the di- 
vine creative power ? " I answer, No ; — 

1. Because, if they prove this of Jesus, they 
prove the same for all the apostles. Did not 
they also heal the sick, and even raise the 
dead? Were not handkerchiefs taken from 
their persons potent to heal disease ? Did 
not Jesus say to his church in reference to 
his works, "The works that I do shall ye do 
also; and greater works than these shall ye 
do ; because I go to my Father ' ' ? 

2. Because, if that divine power was inher- 
ent in him while here, he was not "in all 
things made like unto his brethren," and he 
could not have been "tempted in all points 

[120] 



MIRACLES AND THEIR MEANING. 121 

like as we are," so as to be "touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities. " 

3. If he had this power in himself while 
here, why did he spend nights in patient 
prayer, pleading for strength and deliver^ 
ance ? Why, when tempted of the devil, in- 
stead of meeting Satan with direct power and 
vanquishing him, did he resort, as we have to 
do, to the promises of the written word to 
make Satan flee ? Why, when his strength 
failed, was it necessary for angels to come 
and minister unto him ? 

4. Why does he never claim the power as 
his own, but, instead, always give the glory to 
the Father, as at the grave of Lazarus, where 
he said : ' ' Father, I thank thee that thou 
hast heard me. And I knew that thou hear- 
est me always ; but because of the people 
which stand by I said it, that they may be- 
lieve that thou hast sent me ' ' ? Why does 
he not say, "If I by my own power cast out 
devils, " instead of, "If I cast out devils by 
the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God 
is come unto you ' ' ? Why is it said that it 
was through the eternal Spirit that he offered 
himself without spot for us ? 

5. Why does Jesus emphatically say, "I can 
of mine own self do nothing," "the Father 
that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works ' ' ? 

All this is sufficient to show that Jesus, 
while here, was of himself actually weak and 
powerless, like one of us. His life is not an 



122 GOD IS LOVE. 

evidence of what God could do himself if 
here in person and power. The world needs 
no new evidence of that. The earth, with its 
green, grassy carpet under our feet, and the 
universe of suns and worlds around us, and 
held suspended in space over our heads, is 
certainly present and sufficient proof of that. 
Jesus' life is an evidence of what God can do, 
and of what he is willing to do, by his Spirit, 
w r orking through human weakness. He was 
God manifest in the flesh. Forget this, and 
imagine that Christ himself had inherent 
power, more than human, while here, and 
you have robbed his whole life of its lesson 
of meaning and helpfulness for us. 

The world, lost in sin and separated from 
God, needed more than to have God revealed, 
and the right way to him pointed out. This 
alone would have left them longing but im- 
potent, as was Paul when he said, ' ' O wretched 
man that I am ! who shall deliver me from 
the body of this death ? ' ' Men needed, also, 
to have the source of power presented, by 
which they cou]d be enabled to w r alk in this 
highway of holiness. 

This source of power must be revealed 
before the atonement could be made ; for 
men, to be made one with God and one with 
each other, must be enabled, in spite of sin 
and the inherent hereditary weakness of sin, 
to walk this upward way. So, "what the 
law could not do, in that it was weak through 



MIRACLES AND THEIR MEANING. 123 

the flesh, God sending his own Son in the 
likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned 
sin in the flesh ; that the righteousnes of the 
law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not 
after the flesh, but after the Spirit." 1 The 
law was weak to condemn man because it 
could not give the weakened flesh power to 
keep it. Christ revealed the power of God to 
keep that law in us, if we yield ourselves to 
the control of his Spirit. 

This is the meaning of every miracle, and 
of Christ's whole life of spotless purity, which 
was itself the greatest miracle of all. Jesus 
emptied himself. He gave up his own will, 
his own way, his own power, his own words ; 
and God willed in him, and worked in him, 
and spoke through him. So intimate was 
this union that Jesus said, "I and my Father 
are one;" "he that hath seen me hath seen 
the Father." 

But just as God wrought through him, so 
Jesus waits to work through us. Paul says, 
"For by one Spirit are we all baptized into 
one body. ' ' Now baptism means death and 
burial. When we present our bodies a living 
and daily dying sacrifice, as did Jesus ; when 
our independent wills die, so that in all the 
church there is but one mind, one controlling 
power, then the atonement will be complete, 
then the church will indeed be one body with 
Christ, then will Christ will and work in us 
to do of his good pleasure, as the Father did 



124 GOD IS LOVE. 

in him. For, I repeat, if the mystery of God 
was God manifest in Christ's flesh, Paul says 
the riches of the glory of that mystery for 
you and me is, "Christ in us the hope of 
glory. ' ' Then it will not be merely Christ in 
the Father, and the Father in Christ, so that 
these two are one, but Jesus says, "At that 
day ye shall know that I am in my Father, 
and ye in me, and I in you.'' When this is 
true, then, indeed, is the atonement complete. 

Every miracle of Christ is an evidence of 
the power of the divine love to work in us, 
and lift us to him. How often we have 
looked upon them as mere manifestations of 
physical force, given to make the world look 
and wonder, and almost compel its belief ! 
Ah, no, this was not the meaning ! If it w r as, 
why did Jesus so often, after his greatest 
miracles, say to the one healed, "See thou 
tell no man"? Why not rather say, "Publish 
it abroad everywhere, that you may advertise 
to the world that I am the Messiah ' ' ? 

The fact is, the miracle separated from the 
motive of love which was back of it, — the 
miracle, considered merely as a miracle, — was 
no evidence of Messiahship at all. Satan al- 
ways has his miracles, but they have no love 
in them, and so no spiritual power for good. 
By these miracles, as in the time of Moses, 
he always resists the truth. He is to work 
in the last days with all power, and signs, 
and lying wonders, and all deceivableness of 



MIRACLES AND THEIR MEANING. 125 

unrighteousness in them that perish. When 
he works thus, Jesus himself calls him a 
false christ, with pow r er to deceive all but 
the very elect. 

Why has he no power to deceive the elect ? 
— Because they are kept by the power of 
God through faith unto salvation ; because 
they have learned that God is love, and that 
a miracle, to be any evidence of the divine 
mission and divine power of the w r orker, must 
be such a miracle as manifests only love's 
power. Such were the miracles of Jesus. 
Every one w r as wrought for love's sake; not 
to exhibit mere physical power, not to gain 
popularity or fame, but rather to reveal to 
the world the power of the divine love, which 
is the only power that can heal the soul as 
well as the body, and unite it to him. 

One day a blind man called after Jesus, 
saying, "Thou Son of David, have mercy on 
me ! ' ' He who had beheld all the glory of 
heaven, and gazed even from within on the 
beauty of the rainbow that surrounds the 
throne; he w T ho even here in this world, 
cursed by sin, felt his sensitive soul thrill 
with pleasure at every lingering remnant of 
the former grandeur, drawing lessons of hope 
and cheer from raven and sparrow, and the 
spotless purity of the lily's white leaf, — he 
felt his heart touched to tenderest sympathy 
for this man, locked up in perpetual dark- 
ness, and, strong in love's power through 



126 GOD IS LOVE. 

faith, he touched his eyes, and they were 
healed. Then straightway he charged him to 
tell no man. There was no desire for a pub- 
lic recognition. It was enough for Love to 
know that joy had been given and gratefully 
received. 

One day they brought to him a deaf man, 
and he led him aside from the multitude. 
And he who participated when the morning 
stars sang together, and all the sons of God 
shouted for joy ; he who had listened to the 
majestic symphonies of the angel choirs ; he 
who even here rejoiced in every tone of 
nature's music, and every warbled song of 
praise, — he felt his soul thrill with love's 
longing for that man locked up in perpetual 
silence, and he healed him, that he might 
hear and join the universal psalm of praise. 
But again he charged him that he should tell 
no man. 

He who had fasted forty days, and hun- 
gered, refused to send the hungry multitude 
away, lest they faint on the road. Even at 
the grave of Lazarus, where such wonderful 
power was manifest, it is not recorded that at 
the time the people were so much astonished 
at the mere power itself ; that came afterward, 
when the sweet, subduing influence of the 
moment had passed; but it is recorded that 
there, as Jesus wept, they said, "Behold how 
he loved him ! " Behold how he loved him! Yes, 
this is the meaning of Christ's miracles. 



MIRACLES AND THEIR MEANING. 127 

They reveal the divine love, which thrills 
with sympathy for human needs and human 
heartaches, and is therefore powerful for our 
healing. 

"God is love." The miracles of Jesus re- 
vealed love ; they therefore revealed God, and 
proclaimed Jesus the Messiah, the Anointed 
of God. And why did Jesus weep ? — He 
loved Lazarus. He loved Mary and Martha, 
now bereaved. He loved the Bethany home, 
where he, too, had rested when weary, and 
the circle of whose loving hearts was now 
broken. But, more than this, this was an 
image to him of all the grief that death had 
brought into the world; this family, an image 
of other families ; and this sad parting with 
the loved one, an image of all such sad sep- 
arations. His heart took in a hungry, weary 
humanity, waiting here in grief and tears for 
the dawning of a better day. 

Ah, sad and suffering soul, separated from 
those thou lovest, the heart's tendrils all torn 
and bare and bleeding, dost thou fancy no 
eye sees thy sorrow, that no heart beats 
responsive to thy grief? Heaven itself has 
known the sorrow of parting from its Lord, 
and all the pearly portals of those mansions 
of the skies, so wont to ring to seraphs' 
song, were hushed and draped in mourning. 
And somewhere, we know, though their tears 
may not reach this earth, the angels still 
weep over the sadness of our parting hours. 



128 GOD IS LOVE. 

And not only the angels, but in that weeping 
at the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus wept for us 
all. He revealed to us God, and both Father 
and Son change not, but are the same yester- 
day, and today, and forever. They stoop to 
oneness with us, even now, in our sorrow, 
that we may be lifted to oneness with them 
in their joy. It is thus that Jesus stooped to 
conquer sin and make the atonement. This 
is love, for God is love. 



CHAPTER XVI. 



THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST HONORS GOD'S LAW, 



■•Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of 
thy law."— Ps. 119: 18. 

Satan has always said that God's law was 
arbitrary and unjust, and his government 
tyrannical. By this means he seeks to justify 
his secession from that government, and his 
attempt to exalt his own throne above the 
stars of God. 

In past chapters we have endeavored to 
show that, notwithstanding Satan's cavils, 
the law is a divine revelation of infinite, un- 
changing love. It is our object in this chap- 
ter to show how in the sacrifice of Christ 
the law of God was exalted, and its love re- 
vealed, and yet the transgressor mercifully 
pardoned, so that sinful man could be made 
one with God. 

Paul says, "Do we then make void the law 
through faith ? ' ' This is precisely what many 
modern theologians affirm. Such should hear 
Paul's answer: "God forbid; yea, we estab- 
lish the law" (through faith, understood). 1 
How is it we establish God's law when we 

9 [129] 



130 GOD IS LOVE. 

have faith in Christ? Let us ask another 
question, Why did God not pardon the sinner 
without the sacrifice of Christ? Was it be- 
cause he did not love man sufficiently? — Ah, 
no ! God is revealed through Jesus Christ. 
Christ says, "I and my Father are one." At 
the crucifixion, both the expression of the 
divine love and the revelation of the world's 
depths of defiant sin came to the climax. 
But even there Jesus, dying on the cross 
while the unrepentant world scoffed at its 
feet, poured forth his soul's longings for man 
in these words, ' ' Father, forgive them ; for 
they know not what they do. ' ' 

Thus is revealed how God feels even 
toward an unrepentant world. He longs to 
forgive them. Why does he not do it? — 
Such an act would ignore his law and set it 
at naught, thus leading others to thought- 
lessly violate it. But the violation of that 
law brings as an unavoidable result misery 
and death. No forgiveness that could not re- 
move these would be worth having. A for- 
giveness that led more men into them would 
be a curse rather than a blessing. Every 
good father has at times felt a desire to 
grant his child some present pleasure, but 
has been compelled to forbear, for fear of 
future pain. 

Paul says of Christ: "In whom we have 
redemption through his blood, the forgiveness 
of sins, according to the riches of his grace, 



THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 131 

wherein he hath abounded toward us in all 
wisdom and prudence. ? ' This plainly shows 
that God's love and favor, had God been un- 
wise, might have abounded toward us in an 
imprudent way ; but through Jesus they were 
so prudently manifest that the sinner may 
have pardon and peace, and yet not be led 
thereby to regard sin lightly ; yea, more, he 
may have pardon and peace, and yet the law 
be so exalted and magnified that multitudes 
will be led back to their allegiance. 

If the governor of a State should indis- 
criminately pardon all offenses against the 
law, it would absolutely abolish all restraint 
of law. The motive in his mind might be 
love, but that love would be so unwisely and 
imprudently manifested that it would lead to 
anarchy and misery. The same is true of the 
Governor of the universe. His love and his 
wisdom are one. His pardoning power must 
be so exercised in ' ' wisdom and prudence ' * as 
to lead men to unity and joy, and not to 
anarchy and misery, else it is not love. 

When Port Sumter was fired upon, if in 
a sickly sentimentality the United States had 
said, "Now t we do not want to hurt these 
men; we will let them all go free, rather 
than punish them and cause misery to their 
families," our laws, our government, would 
have been dishonored and disgraced. Men 
would have said, "The Americans have no 
respect for their law T s ; they will not defend 



132 GOD IS LOVE. 

their government. ' ' Our unity would have 
been lost. Other nations would have come in 
each for his share of our territory, and untold 
misery and slavery and death would have 
been the result. Instead of this, we sent 
forth our noblest sons. They shed their life's 
blood, they gave themselves a living and 
dying sacrifice to put down the rebellion. 
When the rebellion was put down, and the 
seceders surrendered, then we manifested our 
disposition to pardon. We pardoned every 
one who would lay down his arms. Even 
leaders in that rebellion were freely forgiven. 
This we could do now, and no one would say 
that we did not respect our laws. This we 
could do now, and not have it tend to more 
misery.* 

Sin is secession from the government of 
God. Satan seceded, and sought to exalt 
his throne above that of God. Sinners are 
those w r ho have joined themselves to Satan's 
forces in this secession. God, in infinite love, 
sends his own and only Son to put down the 
rebellion. He cannot pardon those who are 
still in rebellion, for this would but justify 
the rebellion and dishonor the law, and so 
perpetuate and multiply the misery. But 
through Jesus this rebellion is finally to be 
put down entirely. "The seed of the woman 
shall bruise the serpent's head." O'er every 

*The idea of this illustration is borrowed from Walker's "Plan 
of Salvation/'' 



THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 133 

hilltop of earth and heaven, where for a 
short time there has waved the black stan- 
dard of the man of sin, there shall forever 
float the white pennon of the Prince of Peace. 

Every one who lays down his arms and 
surrenders his opposing will to God has the 
promise of pardon. This pardon God can 
grant, and not dishonor his law. Yea, more, 
it is through this pardon that the mercy and 
love of God's law and government are re- 
vealed, — a love that only commanded the 
right way, not to be arbitrary and domineer- 
ing, but that men might be happy, — a love 
that when men repent of the wrong, and turn 
back their hearts toward the broken law, is 
ever willing to forgive the past and give 
power for future obedience. It is thus that 
God can be just, and still the justifier of 
those who believe on Jesus. 2 It is thus that 
faith in Jesus exalts the law T of God to the 
highest heavens, and establishes it forever. 

The cross of Calvary, to the whole universe 
of intelligent beings, is the greatest demon- 
stration that ever has been or ever can be 
given that God's law is eternal and universal, 
and yet that his love is infinite, reaching 
down with tender, fatherly longing to lift up 
the lowest transgressor. In fact, his love is 
his law, and the law is unchangeable because 
his love is from everlasting to everlasting. 
When men behold this, they are led to re- 
pent of past transgressions, and to pray for 



134 GOD IS LOVE. 

power for future obedience. It is thus that 
Christ is exalted, to be a Prince and a 
Saviour, to give repentance to Israel and for- 
giveness of sins. 3 It is thus that the atone- 
ment is made, and rebellious men are led 
back into unity with God and w T ith one an- 
other. 

The life and death of Jesus — there it 
stands and will stand throughout eternal 
ages, an unanswerable argument to all intel- 
ligent beings of God's unspeakable love, that 
first found expression in the law r , and then, 
when men had violated that law, w r as more 
fully revealed through Christ; a divine, un- 
answerable argument to prove that — 

1. If men suffer, it may not be because 
they are personally guilty, but because of the 
sins of others. Jesus also suffered, the just 
for the unjust. 

2. It is not because God is angry with us, 
or hates us, that we suffer ; for he loved 
Jesus, his only begotten Son, yet Jesus suf- 
fered more than we all. 

3. All the misery of the world is the re- 
sult of the world's violation of God's law of 
love, the keeping of which is the only pos- 
sible way intelligent beings can be happy. 
Misery is, therefore, not only not an evidence 
of the Father's forgetfulness or hatred, but a 
direct, unanswerable proof of that fatherly, 
solicitous love which in the law said, "Thou 
shalt not, my son, thou shalt not." 



THE SACRIFICE OP CHRIST. 135 

4. The only way out of this pit of dark- 
ness into which we have fallen is to repent 
of sin and yield our hearts to keep the di- 
vine law. We can then be forgiven without 
God's ignoring this law, and then God can 
give us power, as he did Jesus, to condemn 
sin in the flesh, and he, by his Spirit, can 
fulfill the righteousness of the law in us. 

5. When this is done, we must not look for 
freedom from sorrow in this world, for we, 
with him, shall bear the sins and sorrows of 
others ; but we may look for the rest that re- 
maineth for the people of God, — for the 
great eternity w r here all the wrongs of earth 
shall be righted, and where what is dark 
here shall be light in heaven. With Job we 
say, "I know that my Redeemer liveth, " and 
with David, "I shall be satisfied when I 
awake with thy likeness." With all the in- 
numerable company we shall reckon our- 
selves pilgrims and strangers here, looking 
for the city that hath foundations, whose 
builder and maker is God. 

6. Instead of sorrow's being an evidence of 
God's wrath, he, in his infinite wisdom and 
love, is using it as a means of discipline and 
development that shall better fit us for the 
joys of heaven. In fact, we have his promise 
that all things shall work together for our 
good if we love him. Even Jesus was made 
perfect through suffering before he could be 
the Captain of our salvation, and shall we 



136 GOD IS LOVE. 

complain if we are required to follow our 
Leader to perfection and joy, over the same 
way he walked ? 

7. The whole life and death of Christ are 
an evidence, a demonstration, of the possibil- 
ity that human weakness may so grasp the 
divine power by faith as to live in this world 
a righteous life and die a triumphant death. 

All these lessons a lost world must learn 
before it can be redeemed. Jesus taught 
them all, and he is the Redeemer. In his 
life and death the whole problem of pain is 
considered and every question answered, and 
answered in harmony with a God that is love. 

This had been the problem of problems. 
Every philosophy had dealt w r ith it in vain. 
Epicureanism, by denying the possibility of a 
future life, plunged men the more hotly into 
the mad race for pleasure here, and so multi- 
plied their misery, and made each sorrow an 
unmixed evil that hid from men the face of 
a living Father. Stoicism sought to benumb 
the feelings of man to suffering, and so, in 
fact, it made them indifferent to the sorrows 
of others. Buddha gave up the problem. He 
said that to exist is to suffer, the only rest is 
in Nirvana. Even Job's comforters answered 
all these questions wrong; and Job's wife be- 
sought him, on account of his sorrow, to 
curse God and die. 

This had been the way of the world, — all 
men through suffering coming to hate God, 



THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 137 

and so going constantly into more sin and 
more suffering, till all knowledge of a God 
that is love was lost. But after men by wis- 
dom knew not, God, it pleased God, through 
Jesus, to reveal himself and solve all these 
problems. The only reason that Job did not 
go with the multitude into cursing and death 
was that by faith he had grasped the promise 
and fact of a given Saviour, and through 
him, of a future where he should "see God," 
and come to understand all his providences 
here. And what remains for us ? What but 
patiently, yes, joyfully, to bear all the sorrow 
that comes, and so fill up that which is be- 
hind of the sufferings of Christ for his body's 
sake, which is the church ? Why should we 
not rejoice in tribulation ? If we are in 
prison, Love holds the keys, and we, like 
Paul, are not prisoners of Caesar, but prison- 
ers of the Lord. Our own good and the 
good of his cause are one, and when it is for 
that good, he will release us, as he did Peter. 
No sorrow can reach us till his love has 
transformed it into a blessing. We are made 
thereby more tender, more kind, our sympa- 
thies are broadened, our hearts enlarged, and 
we are lifted more and more into the atmos- 
phere of divine love, till the atonement is 
complete, and we become one with suffering 
humanity, and at the same time one with the 
Father and one with the Son. 



CHAPTER XVII. 



god's dealing with the wicked. 



"He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life."— John 3:36. 
'The soul that sinneth, it shall die."— Eze. 18 :20. 
"There shall be no more death."— Rev. 21 :4. 

Having considered the love of God as re- 
vealed in his work, as revealed in his law, 
and as revealed in the atonement by which 
men are rescued from the ultimate results of 
the violation of that law, we will now con- 
sider that love as revealed in God's dealings 
with those who persist in sin. 

We have seen that all misery is the result 
of sin, and sin is the violation of God's law. 
God's law, therefore, is simply the way of 
happiness and joy. It is the way the re- 
deemed walk when they return and come to 
Zion, with songs and everlasting joy upon 
their heads. It may be asked, If God is love, 
why does sin exist? why was it permitted to 
exist at all ? why is it permitted to continue 
tQ exist through these long, weary centuries ? 
and when, and how, if ever, will it be brought 
to a final end, and the eternal and universal 
reign of righteousness and peace be ushered 
in? 

[138] 



god's dealing with the wicked. 139 

We believe these questions can all be rea- 
sonably, logically, and consistently answered, 
and answered in harmony with the character 
of a God who is love, and only love. Full 
well we know that the theology of the day 
cannot deal with these questions satisfac- 
torily, but we believe the theology of the 
Bible can. 

In order that man might be other than a 
mere automaton, a machine to manifest the 
mind of God, — in order that he might be a 
separate personality, capable of living, think- 
ing, and acting for himself, and so capable of 
honoring God, by returning him love for love, 
and praise for his goodness, — in order that 
man might be all this, it was necessary that 
he be made free. But to make man free was 
to run the risk of sin. In other words, in 
order that man might be made capable of 
being righteous, it was necessary that he be 
made capable of being wicked. God did not 
make man wicked ; neither did he in the 
fullest sense make man righteous. He simply 
made him capable of both ; capable of the 
one, that he might be of the other. God can- 
not arbitrarily give character, either good or 
bad; if he could, he would be to blame for 
not giving all men righteousness, and conse- 
quent joy. 

There is a difference between innocence and 
character, either good or bad. Innocence is, 
in some sense, the absence of character. If I 



140 GOD IS LOVE. 

have a blank book, with every page white and 
clean, unless the language is made to refer 
exclusively to the mechanical execution of 
the book, it cannot be said to be either good 
or bad ; it is innocent. As I write in it day 
by day, it assumes character, and becomes 
good or bad, according as I write in it good 
or bad things. 

So God made man innocent, and pure, and 
free to choose, and placed him under con- 
ditions favorable to the attainment of a right- 
eous character. He made all intelligent, 
morally accountable beings in his universe 
thus. Some of them chose the evil instead 
of the good, and this accounts for the exist- 
ence of sin and misery. God did not make 
sin or misery. It was not an absolute 
necessity that there should be sin and misery ; 
but it was an absolute necessity that man 
should be made capable of these, else he 
could not be capable of righteousness and joy. 

No one can deny that God ran the risk 
of sin, for that would be to deny the exist- 
ence of sin. This is why he ran that risk, 
because such risk was necessary to the possi- 
bility of righteousness and joy. But eternal 
sin would be an eternal thwarting of God's 
plans for a universe where every creature 
should be rejoicing in his love and returning 
him praise and thanksgiving. So while God 
ran the risk of sin, he did not run the risk 
of eternal sin. 



god's dealing with the wicked. 141 

To avoid eternal sin man was given con- 
ditional existence and access to the tree oi 
life to perpetuate that existence; but when 
he had sinned, lest he put forth his hand 
and take and eat of the tree of life, and live 
forever, an immortal sinner, the Lord drove 
him from the garden, and set an angel to 
guard the way of the tree of life. 

Look upon the world as it is, filled with 
sorrow and suffering. Every city and town 
has its encampment of "low green tents" 
where the silent majority are. Every mound 
holds some heart's treasure. Every hearth 
has its vacant chair, every heart its haunted 
chamber where the silent moonlight of re- 
gretful memory falls. Each soul knows its 
own bitterness, and vainly fancies that others 
walk in the sunlight, while its path only lies 
in the shadows. 

Could the curtain be lifted, and we all see 
men heart to heart, as now eye to eye, what 
ghastly revelations of unknown misery would 
there be ! How many a smiling face but 
seeks, by multiplying the smiles, to hide the 
heart that is bleeding ! If all the misery and 
suffering of only one city were laid open 
before our eyes, we should stand aghast with 
horror ; and yet the world is made up of 
such cities. Ask yourself, would God be 
good, would he be love, to stamp all this with 
immortality ? The answer is, No ! emphatic- 
ally no ! Would he have been either good or 



142 GOD IS LOVE. 

wise to have taken any risks of such eternal 
existence of suffering ? Again the answer is, 
No. But God is good ; he is love. Therefore 
he took no such risks ; but he so conditioned 
immortality on obedience to his divine law as 
to make sin and misery, if they came, but the 
children of a few brief years, while right- 
eousness and joy are eternal. 

Sin is the cause of all misery. Eternal sin 
w r ould be eternal misery. Eternal, hopeless 
sin would be eternal, hopeless misery. The 
eternal existence of the sinner would be his 
eternal conscious suffering. The only escape 
from this is in the assumption of universal- 
ism, but this is not only an assumption, but 
it is in direct contradiction not only to the 
Bible, but also to all we know of the nature 
of sin. 

We know that the nature of sin is to harden 
the heart against good influences. The longer 
it is persisted in, the more sure it is to be 
continued. It requires no inspired word to 
reveal to the philosophical mind the fact that 
to every persistent sinner there comes an end 
of probation, — a time when sin has so hard- 
ened his heart against the influences of good, 
and so strengthened the influences of evil in 
their hold upon his nature, that it is an ab- 
solute certainty that he will never turn from 
sin to righteousness. The eternal conscious 
existence of such an one would be eternal, 
conscious, hopeless misery, going constantly 



god's dealing with the wicked. 143 

down into the deeper depths of darkness and 
despair. 

Would God be good to continue such ex- 
istence forever ? Even in the condition of 
mixed good and evil here, what thoughtful 
man would choose an eternity of this, if he 
could ? There is truth in the old legend of 
the life apple, so beautifully wrought into 
poetic verse by Owen Meredith (Lord Lytton). 

An apple was brought to King Solomon 
from the tree of life, which, if he should but 
eat of, he would live forever. He philoso- 
phizes on life and its failure to satisfy him, 
and concludes that he does not wish to eat it ; 
but he thinks he knows one of his favorite, 
light-hearted wives or concubines to whom it 
will be a great boon. Surely, to her life is 
all joy, and she will wish it perpetuated. He 
gives it to her; but she philosophizes also, 
giving her reasons .for not wishing to eat it. 
She takes it to another ; so it passes all ranks 
of society, from the highest to the lowest, and 
finally comes back to the king, and is pre- 
served in a silver urn, for no one will eat it. 

Even here, so great is the misery that sin 
has caused, that every thoughtful mind would 
hesitate to decide that an eternity of this sort 
of existence was a blessing rather than a 
curse. But here there remains the hope of 
something better to come. If all other hopes 
are gone, to the most despairing soul, who 
knows nothing of the consolation of God's 



144 GOD IS LOVE. 

love, there remains the hope of death, — the 
thought that the ' ' fitful fever ' ' will soon be 
over, it will not be long. Take even this hope 
away, and leave the soul absolutely and hope- 
lessly in immortal despair, to say nothing of 
any literal fire, — could a God who is love give 
such an existence to a single creature he has 
made ? The answer must be, No. 

Suppose he should put the sinner over into 
the next world, restored to its Edenic beauty, 
or over into heaven itself. Sin has brought 
all the misery into this world; and it would 
soon make another world as miserable as 
this. Suppose the sinful souls should be sep- 
arated, and only a few sinners put in a world 
where all were righteous. This would be the 
worst punishment of all. The sinner carries 
a hell with him, in his own heart, and its 
fires would burn the hotter in the pure air 
of heaven. Fancy a man with a burning 
appetite for drink upon him, walking the 
golden streets of the New Jerusalem, looking 
for some place to satisfy his thirst, and 
finding it not; or a woman whose chief en- 
joyment here had been to gossip about her 
neighbors' faults, finding that amusement de- 
prived her there, for the want of material for 
gossip. Such people would want to emigrate. 
Suppose you put them where all are wicked 
and only wicked ; there misery would reign 
supreme. 



GOD'S dealing with the wicked. 145 

Now we have seen that God cannot arbi- 
trarily make the sinful soul righteous, for 
righteousness implies freedom of choice and 
voluntary action. We have seen, also, that 
the persistent sinner will not submit to God, 
to be made righteous of his own free will, 
for sin constantly hardens his heart more 
and more. We have seen that an eternity of 
this sort of life would be a curse and not a 
blessing; that in a state where all but him 
were good, he would be utterly miserable ; 
and that if put where all were bad, misery 
would there reign supreme. 

What is the one thing that infinite, omnip- 
otent Love can do with such a one, and still 
be true to himself ? — He can take away the 
existence he has given him, because he has 
failed to meet the object of that existence, to 
fill the place for which he was created. This 
is justice, this is love, and this God will do; 
for he says, "Yet a little while, and the 
wicked shall not be ; yea, thou shalt dili- 
gently consider his place, and it shall not 
be." 1 "They shall be as though they had 
not been." 2 

This is not only the best, the most loving 
thing that can be done to the sinner himself, 
but, when we consider the interests of the 
righteous, its love is more manifest. From 
the very nature of sin, and of man as a 
social being, we have seen that we must 
bear the consequences of one another's sor- 

10 



146 GOD IS LOVE. 

rows and sins. This must continue as long 
as sin continues. But Jesus suffered, the just 
for the unjust, that he might bring us, the unjust 
ones, to God, We will not complain, but rather 
rejoice to take part in that suffering, for that 
purpose ; but when the time comes that the 
last persistent sinner is so hardened that he 
will not be touched by this suffering love and 
brought back to God, why should we suffer 
longer ? That were hopeless, useless suffer- 
ing. God is love, and he will not permit his 
children thus to suffer. 

Jesus permits us to suffer here with him, as 
he suffered, and for the same purpose, that we 
too might be made perfect through suffering, 
while bringing others to him; but wiien we 
have been perfected, and all others that can 
be brought to him by our suffering love have 
come to him, so that those who remain are 
only worthless, hopeless chaff, then "the Son 
of man shall send forth his angels, and they 
shall gather out of his kingdom all things 
that offend, and them which do iniquity. 
. . . Then shall the righteous shine forth 
as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." 
"What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the 
Lord." "God will gather the w^heat into his 
garner, but the chaff will he burn with un- 
quenchable fire. ' ' 

Says Paul to the faithful, "All things are 
yours, . . . w T hether the world, or life, or 
death, or things present, or things to come; 



god's dealing with the wicked. 147 

all are yours, and ye are Christ's; and Christ 
is God's." 

We, with David, have sometimes been 
tempted to fret because of the apparent 
prosperity of the wicked here, but all things 
are ours. The wicked may hold our inherit- 
ance for a time, leaving us pilgrims and 
strangers here. Shall we complain, when 
Jesus said of himself, "The foxes have holes, 
and the birds of the air have nests ; but the 
Son of man hath not where to lay his head " ? 
— Ah, no! but rather let us look with joyful 
anticipation to the time when the kingdoms 
of this world shall become the kingdoms of 
our Lord and his Christ; for when they are 
his, they are ours ; for he is ours, and we are 
his. "And the kingdom and dominion, and 
the greatness of the kingdom under the whole 
heaven, shall be given to the people of the 
saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an 
everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall 
serve and obey him. ' ' 

Love has had this in view from the begin- 
ning, when he made the world for his glory 
and pleasure and for the joy of his children. 
In spite of sin and sorrow, Love has ever 
been reaching forth toward this grand reali- 
zation, and the kingdom will come. Jesus 
taught his disciples to pray that prayer, ' ' Our 
Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy 
name. Thy kingdom come." That prayer 
has been prayed devoutly and earnestly by 



148 GOD IS LOVE. 

the waiting, weeping church through all these 
centuries. It has gone up from dungeons, 
from mountain caves, and from the martyr's 
funeral pyre of flame. And it w r ill be an- 
swered. Love in patience w r aits, not willing 
that any should perish, but that all should 
come to repentance. "As I live, saith the 
Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death 
of the wicked ; but that the wicked turn from 
his way and live; turn ye, turn ye from your 
evil ways ; for why will ye die ? ' ' 

Yet the chaff must be destroyed and the 
kingdom returned to the faithful. This is 
why God destroys the wicked. He is love, 
and it is best for all that the wicked should 
be destroyed. Then the kingdom shall be 
restored to the righteous, and ' ' every creature 
which is in heaven, and on the earth, and 
under the earth, and such as are in the sea, 
and all that are in them," will be heard 
saying, "Blessing, and honor, and glory, and 
pow T er, be unto him that sitteth upon the 
throne, and unto the Lamb forever and ever." 
Love's object will be accomplished at last, 
and its constant manifestation will bring uni- 
versal acknowledgment, and unbroken, un- 
bounded return of love. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 



WHY HAS SIN BEEN PERMITTED SO LONG? 



''Love suffereth long, and is kind/'— 1 Cor. 13 : 13. 
"The Lord is . . . longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that 
any should perish." — 2 Peter 3 : 9. 

The existence of sin and its resulting mis- 
ery do not in the least antagonize the idea 
that God is love, and only love. The possi- 
bility of sin was a necessity to love's realiza- 
tion. Every parent who brings a child into 
the world to satisfy the God-implanted pater- 
nal instinct of love, runs the same risk. The 
child may be a blessing or he may be a curse 
to his kind; nevertheless, the risk must be 
run, or the very existence of the race must 
discontinue, and not only God's love but all 
fatherly love be defrauded of its realization. 

We have seen how God is to bring sin to 
an end, so that every creature in heaven and 
in earth will finally be found pouring forth 
its thankful praise for an existence which, 
being perfect joy, will be love's highest pos- 
sible realization. This will be accomplished 
by so manifesting his love as to win all that 
can be won to holiness and happiness. The 

[149] 



150 GOD IS LOVE. 

redeemed world will then be peopled with 
these, and all others will be as though they 
had not been. This is the best that infinite 
Love can do for all his creatures, best for 
both the saved and the lost. 

However, the question still remains, Why 
has sin been permitted to continue so long ? 
Why have the weary centuries dragged by 
so slowly, laden with their weight of woe ? 
Why has not Love brought the final triumph 
ere this, and the release of his children from 
misery and pain? Certainly God knew who 
would be incorrigibly sinful ; why did he not 
destroy Satan and his angels in the very be- 
ginning, nor suffer them to tempt the human 
race? Why, when Adam and Eve sinned, did 
he not destroy them, and create other two to 
people this world, nor suffer the curse of sin 
to continue thus till the world itself was 
ruined, and every hill and vale was stained 
with blood and bedewed with tears ? 

It must be remembered that the conflict be- 
tween good and evil is not confined to this 
world. It is a universal conflict. And why ? 
— Simply because, as God made man free, 
and thereby ran the risk of sin, for that same 
reason he made the angels free, he made all 
his morally accountable beings to people all 
worlds, free. In fact, they could not have 
been morally accountable had they not been 
free. Thus the risk of sin was a universal 
risk. I do not say that sin itself was uni- 



WHY HAS SIN BEEN PERMITTED ? 151 

versal ; I do not believe this ; but the conflict 
between sin and righteousness is universal. 

Part of the angels sinned, and they have, 
with their prince, Satan himself, been muster- 
ing and leading the forces of evil ever since. 
Part of the angels did not sin, and they, with 
Prince Emanuel, the Captain of our salvation, 
have been leading the forces of righteousness 
ever since. The battle we are fighting here 
is the same that began up in heaven, when 
Michael fought, and Satan fought, and their 
angels. There is not one intelligent, morally 
responsible being of all the untold millions 
that people the uncounted worlds but is in- 
terested in this conflict, and, in some sense, at 
least, has part in it. All were made free and 
placed upon probation, as were men and an- 
gels. Sometime the conflict will be over, and 
the victory won for truth and right ; then the 
probation of all will close, and all the victors 
will be confirmed in their immortality. 

We know not how many of these worlds 
have been untouched by sin. It may be that 
the fallen angels and man are the only ones 
at war with God. This we do know, our God 
is the God of hosts. When the conflict goes 
hard around us, and we see sin on every 
hand, we sometimes think that the truly 
righteous are diminished from the earth, and, 
with Elijah, almost fear that we are alone, 
and that all others have bowed the knee to 
Baal. At such times we need only to look 



152 GOD IS LOVE. 

up with the eye of faith to know that we are 
a part of the mighty majority, and that our 
Commander, at the head of his hosts, leads 
to victory. 

But what has all this to do with the con- 
tinuance of sin ? We answer, Much ; every- 
thing, in fact. God does nothing arbitrarily. 
He made us all free to choose between good 
and evil. He will never violate that freedom 
in one of his creatures. The whole conflict 
between truth and error, between right and 
wrong, must be fought out to the final con- 
clusion before the eyes of all. That conclu- 
sion depends upon the power of truth and 
right to conquer finally on a fair field, in the 
minds of free, intelligent beings. 

God is on trial. Satan has accused him of 
being hard and unjust; he has said that his 
laws are arbitrary and severe. To the uni- 
verse of intelligent beings God says, "Ye are 
my witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am 
God," — that is, that I am good, that my laws 
and dealings with my creatures are love's 
own; in short, that God is love. 

But all this takes some time. Suppose 
God had blotted Satan and his angels out of 
existence when they first sinned. His only 
object in doing this would have been to put 
an end to sin and misery right there. Would 
it have accomplished that object? 

Satan was an honored angel in heaven, one 
of the leaders of the heavenly hosts. They 



WHY HAS SIN BEEN PERMITTED ? 153 

had not seen the terrible nature of sin. In 
fact they had not really seen Satan do any 
great evil. He had simply accused God, and 
said he was arbitrary and hard. This very 
accusation put God on trial before the free 
minds of his creatures. Was it true or false ? 
If God had then and there blotted out the 
hosts of evil, before evil was allowed to 
develop and reveal its true nature, would 
not those who remained have said that the 
accusations of Satan were just, and that God 
had in that very act proved himself guilty ? 
But this would be, not to put an end to 
sin, but rather to perpetuate and multiply 
it. The very object of God in doing that 
would thus have been defeated. God was 
too wise for that. 

When the soldiers enlisted in our great 
rebellion, they enlisted, not to free the slaves, 
that was not yet the issue of the war, but to 
put down the rebellion. There was a class 
of men, sneeringly called Abolitionists, who 
believed the slaves should be freed. They 
sent a delegation down to President Lincoln, 
beseeching him to make that the issue of the 
war. They brought argument after argu- 
ment, but the president was unmoved. They 
went away, perhaps thinking that the heart 
of Lincoln was not in sympathy with their 
desires. Such, however, was not the case. 
Lincoln loved and pitied the poor slaves ; he 
had not only love but wisdom. He knew that 



154 GOD IS LOVE. 

to make emancipation the issue of the war 
then, would to a large extent disband the 
Northern army, and so defeat that very issue. 
It is a fact that, even when emancipation 
was proclaimed, one regiment of Northern 
soldiers stacked their arms, and said that 
they did not enlist to fight to free the ne- 
groes. Even they, however, afterward re- 
sumed their arms, and fought with the bravest 
and best. Why? — Slavery had been allowed 
to develop itself until it was seen that it meant 
the destruction of the Union. The Union 
could not be preserved, guaranteeing our 
national greatness, without freeing the slaves. 
It was this conviction, and this only, which 
rested in the minds of the Northern soldiers, 
and made them stand by Lincoln in that 
emancipation proclamation, and fight till the 
slaves were free. 

So sin must be allowed to develop until all 
God ? s free, intelligent creatures shall see that 
sin is misery and that righteousness is joy; 
and this is the very reason why God in love 
said, "Thou shalt not," and "Thou shall" 
There is nothing arbitrary here. God is 
acquitted. His pleasure and glory are the 
highest possible joy of all his creatures. Sin, 
successfully continued and carried out, means 
the overthrow of God's government, the de- 
throning of God himself, and the destruction 
of his pleasure and glory ; hence sin is mis- 
ery, and not joy. Universal and eternal sin 



WHY HAS SIN BEEN PERMITTED ? 155 

would be universal and eternal misery. God 
is acquitted, and Satan is convicted. 

When sin is developed until this is seen, 
then God can put an end to sin, and destroy 
the incorrigibly sinful, and every creature in 
his universe will unite with him in this judg- 
ment, and pronounce him just. This is why 
the righteous participate with him in judg- 
ment. It is thus the whole conflict will be 
brought to an end, and the victory be final, 
so that "affliction shall not rise up a second 
time. ' ' 

All this will be done, and yet the perfect 
freedom of every individual mind be main- 
tained through it all. And when the finally 
redeemed pour forth their unceasing and uni- 
versal song of praise and adoration, that 
song will come from souls who are free from 
sin, and yet who retain the full power to 
sin, — separate, conscious, intelligent entities, 
who will never sin, simply because they have 
learned to love righteousness and hate evil. 
They will thus be beings capable of appreci- 
ating a God who is love, and so capable of 
giving him return of love. This was God's 
object in creating the worlds, and Satan and 
sin will not defeat it, nor rob him of his 
longed-for love. 

When the trial and the conflict are ended, 
the final verdict, poured forth in wondering 
praise from the still free minds and hearts of 
all intelligent beings, will be, "Great and 



156 GOD IS LOVE. 

marvelous are thy works, Lord God Al- 
mighty ; just and true are thy ways, thou 
King of saints." Worthy is the Lord that 
created, worthy is the Lamb that was slain, 
to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, 
and strength, and honor, and glory, and 
blessings. 

Satan will not only find himself unable to 
defeat the plan of God, but he will not even 
defer it for a year or a day. When man 
sinned, God said to him, in substance, "I will 
greatly multiply thy seed." 1 Why did he do 
this ? If man had not sinned, at some defi- 
nite time known to God, the world would 
have been peopled with righteous beings, who 
had passed their probationary period, and 
been confirmed in their immortality. When 
man sinned, he greatly multiplied the seed, 
that out of the multitudes that should be 
born and die, he, through Christ, could in 
this same time gather this same number 
that should "be accounted to him for a 
generation. ' ' 

He knoweth the day and the hour, and 
when the dispensation of the fullness of time 
is come, all things will have been gathered 
in Christ, and God's original plan and pur- 
pose will be complete. The universe will 
know then that, if Satan is "mighty," God 
is almighty, and that therefore no power can 
delay his plans. 



WHY HAS SIN BEEN PERMITTED? 157 

Our little lives are lived down here in the 
valley of trial and darkness, and the time to 
us seems long; but what are six thousand 
years compared to eternity ? Says the Lord : 
' ' For a small moment have I forsaken thee, ' ' — 
apparently, as compared with the future re- 
deemed state, — "for a small moment have I 
forsaken thee ; but with great mercies will I 
gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face 
from thee for a moment ; but with everlasting 
kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the 
Lord thy Redeemer." 2 

When a few million years have been spent 
in the full joy of the redeemed, former things 
will not be remembered nor come into mind. 
Not that there will be any arbitrary loss of 
memory, for that would involve the loss of 
identity ; but no shade of past sadness will 
rest for a moment on the soul. The re- 
deemed who have lived long on the height of 
Beulah, if they cast a backward glance, will 
look from hilltop to hilltop, from the para- 
dise that has been gained to the paradise that 
was lost. If the valley of sin and suffering, 
the small moment of his wrath, be thought of 
at all, it will be only that our present joy 
may be increased thereby, and our love to 
him be magnified by the marvelous revelation, 
through redemption, of the great fact that 
God is love= 



CHAPTER XIX. 



WILL THERE BE GAIN? 



"Ours the seed-time, God alone 
Beholds the end of what is sown ; 
Beyond our vision, weak and dim, 
The harvest time is hid with him."— Whittier. 

We have seen why sin exists, and why it has 
been permitted to exist so long. Through the 
mystery of God, the mystery of iniquity is 
explained. The Lion of the tribe of Judah is 
found worthy to open the book and to un- 
loose the seals thereof. We have seen also 
how sin will be brought to an end, and the 
glory of God revealed, so that all flesh shall 
see it together. One question more remains 
on this point : Will there be any gain to God 
and to his creatures as the result of sin and 
redemption ? When redemption is complete, 
will the world and the universe be just where 
it would have been had sin never existed ? 
or will there be a more perfect safety against 
sin in the future, a higher, and deeper, and 
broader knowledge of God's love, and so a 
grander joy and greater peace than would 
otherwise have been possible ? * 

*When we speak of a certain thing as being possible and another 
thing as being impossible with God, we wish to be understood to 
mean that it is impossible with him only in so far as our human com- 
prehension of him is concerned,— that is, it is unthinkable to the 

[158] 



WILL THERE BE GAIN ? 159 

We see a law of suffering running through 
this world. That suffering is not useless ; 
it is permitted for the good of others. The 
flower dies that the fruit may have birth. 
The storm that destroys one man's life and 
property, banishes malaria, destroys the dan- 
gerous germs, and fills the air with new life- 
giving power, thus blessing thousands, so that 
through the loss of some life and joy much 
life and joy have been gained. 

Almost every truth that blesses the world 
has had its martyrs. The few have suffered 
and died ; the many have gained new life and 
joy thereby. In order that the new tree may 
grow and bless the earth with its beauty and 
shade and luscious fruit, the seed must die. 
On every hand the mystery of this death out 
of which life springs is manifest. Is this a 
law of this world simply ? or is it in some 
sense universal ? Does it apply only to cer- 

human mind that it should be possible. In one sense, with God 
nothing is impossible, but in another sense this is not true, for God 
works through, means, that is, through his laws, and he has chosen to 
limit himself by these laws, He wills all men to be saved, but he has 
so constructed the universe that the free choice of good is necessary 
to salvation; he therefore cannot compel men to be good. He cannot 
sa\ e men against their wills, nor can he arbitrarily control their wills. 
We do not absolutely know that he could not have made the universe 
in some other way, but to us this is unthinkable; besides, if he could, 
and thus have avoided the risk of sin. and still reached the end of 
universal righteousness and joy, why did he not do it that way ? The 
inference is that the way he did it is the best and only good way. The 
same is true of his taking advantage of sin to reveal his love and 
mercy and grace, so as to lift men into higher possible joy. It is un- 
thinkable to uhe human mind that the same knowledge of God and the 
same joy could be reached any other way. If they could, why did not 
God do it that way, and so reach this end without sin or the danger of 
sin's entering his* universe ? God never either forced or beguiled any 
one into sin, but he is omniscient. He knew that some would sin, and 
laid his plan accordingly, taking advantage of sin to reveal his greatest 
love, and so to lead his creatures to the hiehest joy. It is reasonable 
to believe that when the end is reached, the redeemed will see that it 
has been reached in the best way, 



160 GOD IS LOVE. 

tain isolated cases of suffering and death ? or 
does it include all suffering and all death ? 
Is God's plan so perfect and so broad as to 
leave no possible room for real loss, but to 
make everything minister to greater gain ? 

We have seen that Satan will not be able 
to defeat, or even to defer, the full realiza- 
tion of God's plan and purpose. Dare we ask 
the question, Is it possible that he is only a 
part of that plan? — not that God ever wished 
Satan or any one else to sin, far less that he 
ever forced him to it. 

God made the inhabitants of all worlds 
free, and works with them only through the 
medium of their free wills. But by making 
them free he ran the risk of sin. This was 
done in all the countless millions of worlds 
made and peopled by him. A continued risk 
implies a final certainty. Was it God's pur- 
pose, when sin came, so to use it as to make 
it minister to a higher holiness and a greater 
possible joy for all his creatures ? Can it be 
that the sum total of all joy is to be in- 
creased rather than diminished by the sum 
total of all suffering ? This would be like an 
omnipotent, omniscient God, — a God who says 
he is love. Is it possible that God's plan is 
so broad as to include all other plans, so that 
even Satan, with all his rebellious schemes, 
falls in as a part of the great harmonious 
whole that lifts the universe into a full real- 
ization of love's ideal? Fortunately, we are 



WILL THERE BE GAIN? 161 

not left to speculate on this question. Paul 
says, "All things work together for good to 
them that love God. * ' In this very connection 
he is speaking of tribulation, and persecution, 
and famine, and nakedness, and peril, and 
sword, — in short, of suffering and all the re- 
sults of sin. 

He does not say all these things are good. 
They are the results of sin, and sin is bad, 
and so these are bad. God hates them more 
than we can, because he loves all his 
creatures more than we do. When God's 
ideal is realized, there will be no place in his 
universe for one throb of pain or one moan 
of anguish. All this will be past then, for it 
is bad. But what the text says is that all 
this works together for good to them that 
love God. Notice how broad this statement 
is, — "all things." That includes all suffering 
as well as all joy. It includes every result 
of sin. ' ' To them that love God ' ' includes 
not only every righteous son and daughter of 
Adam, but every righteous, intelligent being, 
every one of all the hosts that shall people 
the universe when redemption is complete. 

It is evident that if this is true in the life 
of every righteous individual, it is true in the 
sum total of all righteous lives. If each and 
every experience of suffering works together 
for good in the life of each and every one 
who loves God, then all suffering works to- 
gether for the good of all who love God. 

11 



162 GOD IS LOVE. 

But all suffering is the result of sin, there- 
fore, in some way, God is to make the very 
existence of sin minister to the higher good 
of all who love him, that is, of all who shall 
people his universe after redemption is com- 
plete. 

In this life of trial and suffering the high- 
est possible joy that Christianity can bring to 
the individual comes in the firm faith in this 
fact; so the highest possible conception and 
the greatest possible consciousness of God's 
love will come to the universe in the broader 
belief in this fact for all. 

Some may say, How can these things be ? 
Whether we understand them or not, we must 
believe them if we believe God's word. This 
we do know, that perfect joy can come only 
through perfection of character, and in some 
sense even Jesus was made perfect through 
suffering. All his suffering w T as the result of 
sin, though not of his own sin. Even Jesus 
will be raised to a higher joy and a greater 
honor than would have been possible for him 
had it not been for sin. Through his suffer- 
ing and humiliation to redeem the world, he 
will be highly exalted, and given a name that 
is above every name, "that at the name of 
Jesus every knee should bow, of things in 
heaven, and things in earth, and things under 
the earth ; and that every tongue should con- 
fess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of 
God the Father. ' ' Isaiah says, ' ' He shall see 



WILL THERE BE GAIN? 163 

of the travail of his soul, and shall be satis- 
fied. ,? This will be true not only of Christ, 
but of all Christians. With David we shall 
be satisfied when we awake in his likeness. 
We shall see that the sorrow and suffering 
we have passed through here have made us 
capable of a higher joy throughout eternity. 

It has been said that our knowledge con- 
sists solely in a recognition of likeness and 
difference. This is certain. If all things 
tasted the same, the very ideas of sweet and 
sour would not exist; if all things looked the 
same tint, the idea of color would be impossi- 
ble. If some one came from some other 
world where there was flavor and color, and 
told us of these things, we could even then 
have only a vague idea of them. So man 
through sin came not only to know evil, but 
to know "both good and evil." The inhabit- 
ants of other worlds may know much more 
of us than we do of them. Angels are their 
tutors as they were ours before the fall, 
and they may even have the privilege and 
power of visiting this world with the angels. 
Certain it is, the whole record of sin and of 
redemption from sin will be open for their 
inspection. 

All the misery that has resulted from sin 
is a revelation of that wisdom and love that 
said, "Thou shalt not." It is through the 
mighty contrast of sin and righteousness, — 
the mystery of iniquity, which is the mystery 



164 GOD IS LOVE. 

of self-exaltation, leading down into an in- 
finite degradation; and the mystery of God, 
which is the mystery of divine humiliation, 
exalting man to an equality with the angels, 
and lifting even Christ himself to higher 
honor and joy, — it is through this mighty 
contrast spread out before the universe that 
all intelligent beings will come so to know 
good and evil, so to love righteousness and 
hate iniquity, that the danger of sin will be 
overpast. 

What could God's creatures have known of 
his love if it had not been for sin and re- 
demption ? They could see his love as re- 
vealed in his work, but what is this to the 
higher love revealed through redemption ? 
This is a love into which the angels desire to 
look, — a love which even they fail to fathom. 
If even now we could leave this world of sin 
and suffering, and, of the angels that before 
the throne bathe ever in the perfect light of 
love divine, ask what most they thought re- 
vealed the love of God, they would answer, 
"God so loved the world, that he gave his 
only begotten Son." Even they, with all 
God's creatures, will know more of his love 
than they could have known if it had not 
been for sin and redemption from sin; and 
knowing ^aore of that love, they will rest 
safer and surer in that love, and so know a 
deeper joy. 



WILL THERE BE GAIN ? 165 

Grace is unmerited favor. What could God's 
children have known of his grace if all had 
ever merited his favor ? Mercy is another at 
tribute of God. He says his mercy is from 
everlasting to everlasting. Mercy is the dis- 
position to treat an offender better than he 
deserves. Suppose there had never been an 
offender in God's universe; what could his 
children have known of his infinite mercy ? 
The whole plan of redemption is the most 
marvelous manifestation conceivable of his 
grace and mercy. But grace and mercy are 
only different names for, or, rather, different 
manifestations of, love. fSo this is only an- 
other way of showing that through sin and 
redemption God will make a fuller revelation 
of his love than would have been possible if 
sin had not existed. 

But to see God as thus revealed, to know 
him, is everlasting life ; and everlasting life 
is everlasting joy. It is thus that the little 
pain of the few, for this brief "moment," 
will work out the greater joy of the many 
throughout eternity. What wonder that Paul 
said, "Our light affliction, which is but for a 
moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory ' ' ! 

The fourth and fifth chapters of Revelation 
each closes with a grand doxology of praise. 
That of the fourth chapter is based wholly 
upon creation, that of the fifth, on redemption. 
Compare the two. The fourth chapter says : — 



166 GOD IS LOVE. 

"Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory 
and honor and power ; for thou hast created 
all things, and for thy pleasure they are and 
were created. ' ' 

The fifth chapter says : — 

"Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to 
receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and 
strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing. 
And every creature which is in heaven, and 
on the earth, and under the earth, and such 
as are in the sea, and all that are in them, 
heard I saying, Blessing, and honor, and 
glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth 
upon the throne, and unto the Lamb forever 
and ever. ' ' 

The excess of praise and joyful adoration 
in the last over the first is the gain to God 
and his creatures through sin and redemption. 
Paul says he preached the unsearchable riches 
of Christ "to make all men see w r hat is the 
fellowship of the mystery, which from the 
beginning of the world hath been hid in God, 
who created all things by Jesus Christ; to 
the intent that now unto the principalities 
and powers in heavenly places might be 
known by the church the manifold wisdom of 
God." And the wisdom of God is the wisdom 
of that love which said, "Thou shalt not" 
and "Thou shalt." Other translations give, 
instead of "heavenly places," Jieavenlies, or 
heavenly worlds. 



WILL THERE BE GAIN ? 167 

Who has the grandest character here ? he 
who has been nursed in ease and luxury, 
knowing nothing of trial, or he who has come 
up through hardship and struggle, and con- 
quered them all ? Which will make the best 
teacher? Why should not the church of 
Christ, those who have come up through 
great tribulation, and who have conquered in 
his might, — why should not they be used by 
him to initiate the inhabitants of other worlds, 
untouched by sin, into the deeper mysteries 
of his love and holiness ? And so they will, 
for it is said they shall be kings and priests 
unto God, and Paul immediately goes on to 
speak of that love which passes knowledge, 
and of the fact that unto God will be glory 
in the church by Christ Jesus, throughout all 
ages, world without end. 

It is thus seen that Satan is outwitted and 
outgeneraled by God at every point. All his 
planning and scheming for defeating God's 
purpose of love have been only a part of 
God's larger plan by which love's ideal will 
be realized. The death of Jesus was the 
work of the devil, the greatest manifestation 
of sin. Satan thought thereby to thwart the 
plan and purpose of God, but Paul says of 
that very death that Jesus triumphed over 
principalities and powers, in it making a show 
of them openly. These were the principalities 
and powers of evil, with Satan at their head. 
Thus what Satan fancied was his greatest 



168 GOD IS LOVE. 

victory was really God's greatest victory over 
him, — a victory which will finally destroy 
him and his, and unite the universe under the 
mild and loving sway of Prince Emanuel. It 
is thus that God maketh the wrath of man, 
and of devils too, to praise him, and the re- 
mainder of wrath — all that he cannot make 
work for good, — will he restrain. 

It is ever thus in our lives. The hour of 
the greatest temptation and darkness may be, 
through him, the hour of the greatest tri- 
umph. From the very valley of the shadow 
of death we may rise to a new life and a new 
joy, for all things work together for good to 
them that love God, and to love God is to 
know that God is love. 



CHAPTER XX, 



THE CLOSING OP PROBATION. 



"The Lord is good ; his mercy is everlasting, and his truth en- 
dureth to all generations. 1 '— Ps. 100:5. 

We often hear the expression, " while 
mercy lasts," or, "till mercy ends." These 
expressions are not only unscriptural in 
themselves, but the idea they carry with 
them is foreign to the whole Bible, and en- 
tirely contrary to the character of God. The 
thought that oftentimes underlies them is 
something like this : God is merciful now, 
but the time is coming when he will cease to 
be merciful. God accepts repentance now, 
but the time is coming when men may repent 
never so sincerely, but it will be too late, 
God will not accept that repentance. God 
loves the sinner now, but the time is coming 
when that love will turn into consuming 
anger and unrestrained wrath. 

Nothing could be more absolutely false 
than such ideas. But says one, Do you not 
believe, does not the Bible plainly teach, 
that there is to be such a thing as the 
closing of probation ? We answer, Most cer- 

[169] 



170 GOD IS LOVE. 

tainly. And will not sinful man sustain a 
different relation to God then than now ? If 
he is not saved before that time, will not his 
salvation then be impossible ? " Again we an- 
swer, Yes, to both of these questions. Where, 
then, is the fallacy in these expressions ? It 
is in the idea running through them all that 
God changes, and that it is to be some 
change in his feelings toward sinful man 
that is to bring about the close of probation. 

A change there is to be, bringing that aw- 
ful hour when the destiny of all men will be 
unalterably fixed, w r hen he that is righteous 
will be righteous still, and he that is filthy 
will be filthy still; but that change is wholly 
in man, not in God. 

The very word ' ' God ' ' means good. The 
psalmist says, "From everlasting to everlast- 
ing, thou art God." That is, from everlast- 
ing to everlasting thou art the supreme, the 
over-ruling, the all-embracing and all-un- 
changing Good. Says the Lord: "I change 
not;" "with me there is no variableness, 
neither shadow of turning." "Jesus Christ 
is the same yesterday, today, and forever." 
He is himself the "Everlasting Father" of 
all created beings ; he inhabiteth eternity. 
Knowing all the future, with its terrible cli- 
max of guilt and rebellion, as well as all the 
past, with its history of repeated and con- 
stant wanderings from him, he is not dis- 
turbed or surprised into anger by any sudden 



THE CLOSING OF PROBATION. 171 

development of sin. Wonderful as it may 
seem, with the whole dark fact of sin, past 
and future, spread out before him, he still 
loves us with an "everlasting love," and with 
loving - kindness he has ever sought to draw 
us to him. David says, l ' The Lord is good ; 
his mercy is everlasting, and his truth en- 
dureth to all generations. ' ' 

All this is sufficient to show that whatever 
change there is in bringing about the close 
of probation, that change is not in God, but 
in man. "I have not forsaken you, saith the 
Lord, but ye have forsaken me." 

God is love ; he is everlasting love. He 
never has and never will forsake any one; 
but men forsake him, the Fountain of living 
water, and then hew out for themselves cis- 
terns, broken cisterns, that can hold no w T ater. 
The world will finally forsake God entirely, 
and give themselves over wholly to the last 
great delusion of error. This is the closing 
of probation. The study of the closing of 
probation is the study of the unpardonable 
sin. 

Jesus Christ, in infinite love, and by the 
power of the Spirit of God, was healing dis- 
eases, forgiving sins, and casting out devils. 
There were those who, looking on, admitted 
that never man spake such words or wrought 
such works ; and yet they were so blinded 
and hardened by sin that they failed to dis- 
tinguish between the supreme Spirit of good 



172 GOD IS LOVE. 

and the supreme spirit of evil. They said, 
"He casts out devils by Beelzebub, the prince 
of devils." Jesus said this sin could not be 
forgiven them, neither in this world nor in 
the world to come. Why was this ? Was it 
because the sin was so great that it made 
the Lord so angry he could never get over 
it? This would be to make God altogether 
such an one as ourselves, only greater, and 
more furious, and more enduring in his wrath. 
He requires us to forgive the repentant one 
without limit, and will he not do the same ? 
He condemns the holding of anger in us, and 
does he hold hatred himself ? This would be 
his requiring us to be holy as he is not. 
Says Whittier : — 

"The wrong that pains my soul below 
I dare not throne above." 

There must be some other reason why that 
sin is unpardonable. God made men free to 
choose between the right and the wrong. If 
they had chosen the right and continued in 
that way, by the very law of heredity and 
the law of the influence of environment the 
power of the good over them would soon 
have become so strengthened, and the power 
of the evil so weakened, that the danger of 
sinning would be overpast. But men chose 
the evil and continued in it, thus turning 
those beneficent laws against themselves. 
Through the working of those same laws, 



THE CLOSING OF PROBATION. 173 

the power of good over us has become so 
weakened, and the power of sin so strength- 
ened, that men are born slaves to sin. 

God gives us his Spirit to restore this free- 
dom that has been lost through sin. It was 
because the Spirit of the Lord was. upon 
Jesus that he came to proclaim liberty to the 
captive. Jesus said, "No man can come to 
me, except the Father which hath sent me 
draw him ; ' ' and again, ' ' No man can come 
unto me except it were given unto him of my 
Father." Not that God draws some and does 
not draw others, and so makes salvation pos- 
sible only to the favored few ; for the same 
Jesus says, "I, if I be lifted up from the 
earth, will draw all men unto me," — not 
compel them to come, but draw them, so as 
to make it possible for them to come, — so as 
to restore the freedom that has been lost 
through sin. 

The Spirit of God w r ould never have striven 
w T ith men if it had not been for the plan of 
redemption, which centers in Christ; but now 
through him all men are set free. He is the 
Light that lighteth every man that cometh 
into the world. That Spirit reaches us just 
where we are, taking all the circumstances of 
birth, of heredity, and of environment into 
consideration. By it the balance of the mind 
is restored, so that "whosoever will may 
come. ' ' This gives man a second chance ; 
but if man resists the Spirit, and chooses the 



174 GOD IS LOVE. 

evil again, he again makes himself a slave. 
Sin, persisted in, hardens the heart against 
the influence of the Spirit of God, and 
strengthens the power of evil over us, until 
a point is reached where it is absolutely cer- 
tain that w r e will never turn and repent. 
Whenever any man has become so hardened 
and blinded by sin as to be unable to dis- 
tinguish between the workings of the Spirit 
of God and the workings of Satan, that point 
has been reached by him, and that man's 
probation is at an end. This is why the sin 
against the Holy Spirit is unpardonable. 

God can never pardon any sin till it is re- 
pented of. It is the goodness of God mani- 
fested through his Spirit that leads us to 
repentance. But how can that Spirit lead a 
man to repentance toward God when he at- 
tributes the very working of that Spirit upon 
his own heart to the devil and not to God ? 
Manifestly it cannot. That man's probation 
is closed. God is just the same ; his mercy 
and love and tender pity have not changed; 
but the man, by persisting in sin, has cut 
himself off from God, and put himself outside 
of the plan of redemption. The sin is unpar- 
donable because it is unrepentable. 

This is the terrible danger of sin. Every 
ray of light resisted, every willful sin com- 
mitted, brings the man nearer that point where 
the current is so strong and the strength so 
slight that there is no returning. We cannot 



THE CLOSING OF PROBATION. 175 

tell, but God knows, when any man reaches 
this point ; and when he does, his probation is 
ended. 

Now what is the closing of probation for 
the world ? This is certain, it is not the 
limit of God's love for the world. God has 
a great truth for the inhabitants of earth. 
The everlasting gospel in its fullness is to be 
preached to every nation, kindred, tongue, 
and people. The message is a marking one; 
it marks those who obey, or seals them for 
God; it marks those who disobey, or seals 
them for the " beast. " (Read the thirteenth 
and fourteenth chapters of Revelation.) 

What does this mean ? Simply this : Some 
accept the light ray by ray, as God gives 
it. Step by step they are led on till they 
become sanctified through the truth. Every 
step makes their hearts tenderer and more 
susceptible, and places them more completely 
under the control of the power of God, till 
finally in their mouth is found no guile, and 
they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. 
God's law is imprinted by his Spirit in their 
hearts, and they are marked before earth and 
heaven as his. Others reject the light as it 
comes till the light within them becomes 
darkness. Their heart becomes harder and 
harder, and their spiritual eyesight is dimmed. 

God is working with mighty power; the 
message is going with a "loud cry." Satan 



176 GOD IS LOVE. 

is also working with all deceivableness of 
unrighteousness in them that perish. 

In each man's life there comes a time when 
he must make his final choice between right 
and wrong. If he chooses wrong, he accepts 
the work of Satan as the great power of 
God, and rejects the work of God's Spirit as 
the work of Satan. When he does this finally, 
he has committed the unrepentable, and there- 
fore the unpardonable sin. He does not do it 
all at once, but step by step. In resisting the 
light, his heart is hardened, and he is led up 
to this final stand ; and when this place is 
reached and this stand taken, the man's pro- 
bation is at an end. He is marked, or sealed, 
for the "beast," or Satan. 

The message goes on with increasing power. 
Men continue to resist it. Another takes his 
final stand, then another, another, and another; 
the time comes when every man that has not 
accepted the truth and been sealed for God 
has finally rejected it, and attributed all its 
power to Satan. They have all committed 
the sin that is unpardonable, because it puts 
the man beyond the reach of the Spirit 
which leads to repentance. When this point 
is reached, there is no reason for the work 
to continue longer. The awful voice of God 
is heard announcing the solemn fact that all 
men have made their final choice, and that he 
that is filthy will be filthy still. 



THE CLOSING OF PROBATION. 177 

This is not God saying, I have changed, 
but it is God saying to sinful man, You have 
changed. It is not God saying, I will not 
accept repentance and forgive sins any more, 
but it is God saying, Man will not give re- 
pentance and so permit me to forgive sins 
any more. 

If the ministration in the heavenly sanc- 
tuary is over and the door of the temple 
closed, it is not that God is weary of dis- 
pensing pardon and mercy, but that there are 
no more applicants for pardon and mercy. 
God is the same ; his mercy endureth forever ; 
his love is infinite and eternal. When Jesus 
said to the Jewish people, "O Jerusalem, Je- 
rusalem, which killest the prophets, and 
stonest them that are sent unto thee ; how 
often would I have gathered thy children to- 
gether, as a hen doth gather her brood un- 
der her wings, and ye would not!" "If thou 
hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy 
day, the things which belong unto thy peace ! 
but now they are hid from thine eyes," — that 
was the closing of probation to the Jewish 
people as a nation. The national promises 
that God had made and conditioned on their 
obedience were now forever slipping from 
their grasp. As the destruction of Jerusalem 
imaged the final destruction, so this imaged 
the final close of probation. 

But these words did not come from an 
angry, revengeful God; they came from the 



178 GOD IS LOVE. 

great heart of tender, pitying, yearning, yet 
forsaken love. Jesus was weeping. This is 
God, for God is love. "As I live, saith the 
Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death 
of the wicked ; but that the wicked turn from 
his way and live; turn ye, turn ye from your 
evil ways ; for why will ye die ? ' ' No man 
will ever genuinely repent and God not accept 
him. If he did refuse to accept the repentant 
sinner, he would deny himself. 

Some may think of the passage in Amos 
where it speaks of the famine for the word 
of the Lord, and says they shall wander from 
sea to sea seeking the word of the Lord, and 
shall not find it. It is true this refers to 
that time, but who is it that thus seeks the 
word of the Lord and finds it not? The 
next verse tells : ' ' They that swear by the 
sin of Samaria, and say, Thy God, O Dan, 
liveth. " The sin of Samaria was the sin of 
mingling the worship of God with sun wor- 
ship. The god of Dan was an Egyptian sun 
god. This refers to the time when their 
false theocracy has failed to satisfy and give 
them the peace that they sought. As the 
prophet says, instead of realizing their fanati- 
cal ideals, "they pass through it, hardly 
bestead and hungry," and they curse their 
king and their god (Satan, who is leading 
them) and look upwards. Why do they not 
find forgiveness and see the light ? — Because 
they still cling to their sun worship, and 



THE CLOSING OF PROBATION. 179 

swear that it is of the Lord. As Moore 

says : — 

"Faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast 
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last." 

God cannot accept them, for they will not 
accept him and his truth. They feel their 
need of something, but, blinded and hardened 
by sin, they still attribute the Lord's work 
to Satan, and are looking for something else, 
and trying to make the Lord come to their 
terms. 

While these thoughts reveal to us a God 
whose love is infinite and unchanging through- 
out eternity, they also reveal the terrible 
hardening, blinding nature of sin, every step 
in which brings us nearer the point where 
return is impossible. In fact, by revealing 
the terrible nature of sin they reveal the love 
of that Father that said of sin, "Thou shalt 
not, my child, thou shalt not." 



CHAPTER XXI. 



'HIS STRANGE ACT. 



"The Lord shall rise up as in Mount Perazim, he shall be wroth 
as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange 
work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act."— Isa. 28 :21. 

It has been the object of this little book to 
show that all God's acts in his dealings with 
humanity come from the motive of love. 
Against this proposition it is often urged 
that his vengeful wrath destroyed the old 
world by a flood, and that a little later that 
same wrath obliterated entirely the fair cities 
of the plain, leaving only the dull surges of 
the Dead Sea to sing their requiem. He also 
exterminated the Canaanitish tribes, man, 
woman, and child, and gave their lands and 
their homes to others. 

These things, as recorded in the Bible, it is 
thought reveal the character of the Jewish 
Jehovah and the Christian's God as anything 
but love. We may agree that there are some 
things here we cannot understand, because we 
do not know all the circumstances connected 
with them. I firmly believe, however, that 
the application to these special cases of the 

[180] 



HIS STRANGE ACT. 181 

principles already made plain in these chap- 
ters will relieve them of very much of their 
difficulty. 

We have seen what the closing of proba- 
tion is, — that hardening of the heart against 
the power of truth and righteousness which 
is the natural result of persistent sinning. 
There is no limit to God's mercy and love; 
but as righteousness in the individual soul is 
the result of God's working in and through 
that soul, when it is of its own free will sub- 
mitted to him, the pow r er of God to save men 
from sin into righteousness is limited by 
their willingness to submit themselves to 
him. When that willingness or power is lost 
through rebellion continued till the habits of 
the mind have become fixed, then the case is 
hopeless. 

Not certain individuals simply, but the 
world, is to come to that place at the last, 
and then the world's probation will be at an 
end. The w T orld came to that place once be- 
fore. Every imagination of the heart was 
only evil, and evil continually. Through 
continued sinning, generation after genera- 
tion, the world became so wicked that the 
nobler desires were either wholly obliterated 
or hopelessly under the control of the baser 
passions. Through the laws of heredity and 
environment this tendency to sin was trans- 
mitted to the child even before it was born, 
and forced upon him by his surroundings 



182 GOD IS LOVE. 

from his earliest conscious moment. This 
had gone so far that even the children were 
hopelessly enslaved. This also was the con- 
dition of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, 
and of the Canaanitish tribes after they had 
filled up the cup of their iniquity. 

We have seen that sin is misery. Con- 
tinued, hopeless sin is continued, hopeless 
misery. This is the one thing that Love 
cannot permit, but the only alternative at 
such times is destruction. We have seen that 
it was love that guarded the way of the tree 
of life, lest men eat and live forever, immor- 
tal sinners ; and we have seen that it will be 
Love that destroys the wicked at last. But 
every reason that love has for the final de- 
struction of the wicked, it also had for the 
destruction of the old world and the cities of 
the plain, and for the extermination of the 
Canaanitish tribes. Indeed, these are all 
taken by inspiration as images of the future 
destruction, and are set forth as ensamples 
to them who should afterw r ard live ungodly. 
To have continued their existence would have 
been not only to continue their own misery, 
but to continue the bringing into existence 
of millions of children with a heredity and 
an environment which would make their con- 
tinued sin and suffering a certainty from the 
very start. 

The existence of such nations or cities in 
the world is also a constant menace to the 



HIS STRANGE ACT. 183 

happiness and virtue of all others. When a 
cancerous humor has fastened itself upon the 
hand, or the gangrene is persistently at work 
in the foot, it may seem cruel to amputate 
the member, but at such times Love holds 
the knife. The difference between murderous 
savagery and the most heroic love may 
not be a difference in the act itself, but 
only a difference in the motive which under- 
lies the act. 

This being true, it is not strange that those 
who have persistently misunderstood God's 
character in almost everything, should have 
in this attributed to him the wrong motive. 
He who know r s, both from experience and 
revelation, that God is love, and who keeps 
ever before him the fact that love takes no 
pleasure in death and destruction, will be- 
hold, even in these otherwise dark deeds, the 
revelation of the same watchful, all-embrac- 
ing, and heroically unselfish Love that with- 
held not his own and only Son, but freely 
delivered him up for us all. 

God takes no pleasure in the death of the 
wicked; but that which considers its own 
pleasure as of the first importance, is not 
love at all, but selfishness. True love always 
regards the welfare of the object loved as of 
first importance, and such love often compels 
its possessor to do that which grieves him to 
the heart. It is thus the true father is com- 
pelled at times to punish the child; it is thus 



184 GOD IS LOVE. 

our Father has dealt with the world, and it 
is thus he deals with us as individuals. If 
we be without chastisement, then we are bas- 
tards, and not sons. 

There is a story of four blind men who vis- 
ited a menagerie, and because they could not 
see, were permitted to feel of the elephant. 
One felt of his tail, another of his side, the 
third of his leg, and the fourth of his ear. 
Afterward they were disputing among them- 
selves in the effort to come to some agree- 
ment as to what the elephant was like. The 
one who felt of his side said he was like a 
great wall, while the one who felt of his tail 
said, "Oh, no! he is only like a large rope, " 
The others disagreed with both of these, and 
also with each other, for the one who felt of 
his leg said the elephant was like the trunk 
of a tree, and the one whose hand had 
handled the elephant's ear, said that his im- 
pression was that the animal was a very pe- 
culiar one, more closely resembling a large 
leather bag than anything else he could 
think of. 

Blinded by sin and limited by our little 
lives to the narrow span of these few years, 
and by our feeble intellects to a few of the 
many facts that underlie his purposes, it is 
thus we are compelled to touch God's mighty 
providences only at certain points, and our 
impressions may be varied, and all of them 
wrong. 



HIS STRANGE ACT. 185 

We may criticise and condemn as unjust 
his deeds, until our own hearts are moulded 
and hardened into the image of all the evil 
we attribute to him. Far better is it that 
faith should grasp and hold the great truth 
that God is love, and then, instead of judging 
and condemning God because we cannot now 
see the perfect symmetry of Love's ideal, we 
will wait for the future, when we shall know 
as we are known. Yes, wait in perfect faith, 
that w r hen the whole of God's great plan is 
seen, the love that permeated every part will 
be manifest. 

And, waiting thus, faith sweeps back the 
horizon of our lives, till we, too, inhabit eter- 
nity with him, our citizenship over yonder, 
our life the eternal life which he has given; 
and then, reasoning on the darkest of his 
providences, either in the history of the 
world or in our own lives, and reasoning 
from the standpoint of our settled and abid- 
ing confidence in his love, we shall be sur- 
prised to see how many of the shadows even 
here will vanish ; and how the warm sunshine 
of his living presence will illumine and glo- 
rify many a dark corner in our hearts, from 
which, till now, our unbelief has excluded 
him. 



CHAPTER XXII. 



THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT. 



'• Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously.''— Ex. 15 : 21 

In the minds of many, another objection to 
the idea that God deals with his creatures 
only in love, is found in his terrible judg- 
ments upon Egypt, whereby his children were 
delivered from bondage. 

It is admitted here that God loved his own 
people, the Israelites, and worked mightily 
for their deliverance; but it is thought that 
his dealings with the Egyptians were charac- 
terized only by unrestrained anger and wrath. 
Such fail to understand the meaning of 
those plagues, and also of the scripture 
which says : — 

" O give thanks unto the God of gods ; for his mercy 
endureth forever. ... To him that smote Egypt in 
their firstborn; for his mercy endureth forever; . . . 
and overthrew Pharaoh and his hosts in the Ked Sea; 
for his mercy endureth forever. ... To him which 
smote great kings; for his mercy endureth forever; and 
slew famous kings; for his mercy endureth forever." 

It is evident that the psalmist in the con- 
templation of these very judgments of God, 
was impressed, not with his hatred and un- 

[186] 



THE PLAGUES OP EGYPT. 187 

restrained anger, but rather with the wonder- 
ful endurance of his loving mercy. Such 
will be the attitude of our minds when we 
too are guided by the divine Spirit into that 
closer communion with the All -Truth, that 
shall make us also men after God's own 
heart. 

What was God's purpose in the deliverance 
of Israel ? — Not simply that they might be 
saved, but that through them he might so 
reveal himself to the world as to reach and 
save all who could be saved. The heart of the 
All -Father was then, as ever, yearning over 
all his children. All that he gave to Israel 
was "for us," and for all the Gentile world. 
The highest privilege of the Jewish people, 
had they attained to it by a faithful obedi- 
ence, was simply to be ,the medium through 
which all nations should be blessed ; and, 
indeed, in a certain sense, though not as it 
would have been, this will be realized in 
spite of their unbelief, for God's plan never 
fails because of our faithlessness. 

The Egyptians once had a knowledge of 
the true God, the Creator, and so sacredly was 
he regarded that they refused to take his name 
upon their lips, but instead they called him 
the Sacred, the Self - existent, the Unnamable 
One. Although the Egyptians had gone the 
downward way from the worship of God to 
the worship of the sun, and from sun wor- 
ship to star worship, and the lowest forms of 



188 GOD IS LOVE. 

nature worship, multiplying their gods till it 
became a proverb that there were more gods 
in Egypt than men, yet the knowledge of 
this true God still lingered as a shadowy be- 
lief, held by the 61ite, the educated few. 
These regarded the multitude of gods as only 
demigods, or lesser gods, yet they worshiped 
them instead of the supreme One, because 
they believed the devil's lie, that the Creator 
was too far above them and had too much to 
attend to, to notice their prayers or care for 
their worship. 

When God sent Moses and Aaron to Pha- 
raoh, he said from the burning bush, "Thus 
shalt thou say unto him, I AM THAT I AM 
hath sent me unto you;" that is, the Sacred, 
Self-existent, Unnamable One that you pro- 
fess to believe in, hath sent me hither to de- 
mand that his people, the Israelites, shall be 
set free to go and worship him. Pharaoh 
said, "Who is the Lord, that I should obey 
his voice to let Israel go ? I know not the 
Lord, neither will I let Israel go." 

In this Pharaoh was partially honest. He 
did not believe that this supreme God cared 
for the worship of men, far less that he cared 
for the worship of those Hebrew slaves. 

Paganism always ascribed its national suc- 
cess to the greatness of its guardian gods. 
So to Pharaoh it seemed that if the Israelites 
had a God at all, he was only the God of 
slaves, and under the control of their gods, 



THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT. 189 

sustaining about the same relation to them 
that the Hebrew people did to the Egyptians. 
For them, while in slavery to the Egyptians, 
to claim that their God was the God whom 
even he admitted to be above all, was pre- 
posterous; it was more, it was blasphemy 
against the gods of Egypt, and, worse than 
that, it was an assertion of their power, and 
a demand for their right of independence 
from the Egyptian yoke. What wonder that 
Pharaoh increased their burdens and applied 
the lash, thinking to whip such foolishness 
out of them ! For him, the king of Egypt, to 
admit the claim of these slaves that their 
God, the God who demanded their freedom, 
was identical with the supreme God of gods, 
whom he regarded as above noticing even 
him, was for him to admit their right and 
power of independence, and their superiority 
as a race in the estimation of God, to even 
what he claimed for the Egyptians. What 
wonder that the haughty monarch refused to 
admit all this ! 

But every act of God in his dealing with 
him from this on was for the purpose of 
bringing him to see and admit this truth ; 
and not only him, but the world through him. 
Had Pharaoh remained true to himself and 
the light that God revealed to him, he might 
have lost some slaves, but he would have 
found a loving Father, where before he had 
only in a theoretical way believed in a stern, 



190 GOD IS LOVE. 

immovable, uncaring, and unnoticing God. 
He is not the only one, however, who, w T hen 
called upon to decide between things seen 
and things unseen, the temporal and the eter- 
nal, has decided wrong. 

The very first sign that Moses w T as to give 
Pharaoh had a wonderful meaning. Moses 
cast down his rod, and it became a serpent. 
The magicians did likewise, or rather by 
magic made it appear to the people that they 
did likewise. But the serpent that came from 
Moses' rod devoured the other serpents, and 
then turned to a rod again in his hand. 

The serpent in Egypt was held as sacred, 
and worshiped as a god. To deify reptiles 
and worship them is one of the lowest forms 
of idolatry, the last step in the downward 
way. These reptiles, since the serpent 
tempted Eve, have symbolized Satan, and 
their worship was devil worship inspired by 
fear. By this act, wrought in the power of 
God and according to his special direction, 
Moses demonstrated to Pharaoh that the God 
of the Hebrew slaves could make and un- 
make the Egyptian gods at his pleasure. He 
could create them and he could destroy them, 
and therefore he must be the God whom even 
he admitted to be above all, the only one 
who had the power to triumph over the very 
evil which they personified thus and wor- 
shiped through fear. In this there was not 
only a revelation of the true God, but also a 



THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT. 191 

proclamation of the gospel, — a revelation of 
the power to triumph over sin. Pharaoh saw 
the truth, but through pride and worldliness 
he refused to heed it, and thus his heart was 
hardened. 

There is an old and true proverb that says, 
" Egypt is the gift of the Nile." Upon the 
annual overflow of this river depended the 
wonderful fertility of the soil, which would 
otherwise have been like the great Sahara, 
utterly incapable of supporting life. The 
Egyptians, recognizing this fact, instead of 
giving glory to God, personified and wor- 
shiped the river. They drank of its waters 
with reverence, believing they had power to 
heal disease and impart new life. Upon its 
banks was a magnificent temple, where was 
enshrined a colossal statue of this god Nilus, 
and to this the king and all the nobles re- 
sorted at fixed times for worship. 

The God of the Hebrew slaves turned this 
river into blood, making it death-dealing in- 
stead of life-giving. The Egyptians could not 
drink of the water, for it stank ; and not all 
the combined powers of the gods of Egypt 
could restore the river to its former state. 
The God of the Hebrews alone could restore 
the river, thus proving that to him alone was 
due all the reverence and worship which they 
had foolishly given to his work. 

The frog also was a sacred animal, and was 
worshiped with much pomp by the Egyp- 



192 GOD IS LOVE. 

tians. The God of the Hebrew slaves multi- 
plied the frogs till they became a terrible 
pest, and the land stank. The proud Pharaoh 
had to appeal to the God of his slaves, 
that the gods of Egypt, that had been made 
by him, might also be destroyed by him, for 
there was no power in all the deities of 
Egypt to effect this much -desired result. 
Still Pharoah resisted the truth and hardened 
his heart. 

By the decree of this same omnipotent God 
of the Hebrew slaves, the very dust of Egypt 
became lice upon all men throughout the 
land. Now the louse was considered unclean. 
If it touched the person, it necessitated, 
among the Egyptians, as later among the 
Jews, a long process of purification before 
the priest could officiate at the altar, or the 
devout citizen appear there acceptably to 
offer sacrifice. Thus by the decree of Jeho- 
vah every temple of Egypt was closed, and 
every shrine was for a time deserted. There 
was no priest to officiate and no worshiper 
to offer sacrifice ; and thus was it proved that 
the whole of that false system of worship, 
with its many temples and its multitudes of 
priests and priestesses, and its magnificent 
ceremonials, existed but by the sufferance of 
the supreme One, who in his tender mercy 
was seeking to lead all to him. 

In Egypt there was one deity whose spe- 
cial duty it was to protect the land from the 



THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT. 193 

swarms of flies and destructive insects which 
sometimes infested it; and another, to whose 
worship was attributed the salubrious climate 
and the absence of destructive storms. In 
spite of these deities, and notwithstanding 
every effort was made to propitiate them, at 
the command of the Hebrews' God the flies 
came in swarms with their poisonous sting, 
making life itself a burden ; and at the same 
command the lightnings flashed, and the thun- 
der rolled along the ground, while the terrible 
hail destroyed the crops and killed both man 
and beast found unprotected in the fields. 
The murrain fell upon the cattle, killing 
even the sacred ox, the center of the abom- 
inable, lascivious Apis w r orship. The magnifi- 
cent temple, the boast of Egyptian archi- 
tecture, w T as deserted, or filled only with the 
silent mourners for the dead god. The silver 
trumpets of the priests and the songs of the 
nude dancing maidens w x ere hushed. 

What a revelation of the fact that there is 
one God, and one only ! Not in all Egypt 
could there one honest, sincere soul still re- 
main deceived by the hollow mockery of so 
vile a polytheism. 

The worship of the sun was the very cen- 
ter and kernel of the state religion. In va- 
rious forms, conceived of as possessing varied 
powers, he stood at the head of each different 
order of gods, and was personified as the god 
of gods. Yet at the command of the God 

13 



194 GOD IS LOVE. 

who now demanded the freedom of the poor 
Hebrew slaves, the glory of this supposed 
supreme one vanished. He withdrew his 
shining, and in Egypt there was darkness 
that could be felt; but in the land of Goshen, 
where the Creator of the sun was acknowl- 
edged supreme, there was light. 

Even in the death of the firstborn, that his 
people might be delivered, had they not re- 
sisted the light unto perfect blindness, the 
Egyptians might have beheld revealed the 
divine Love that had not withheld his First- 
born, yea, his Only Begotten, but had con- 
sented unto his death that they might have 
deliverance from the power of death, unto 
everlasting life. Even this was not so diffi- 
cult a thought for them, for the power of 
the original promise of the divine Son over 
the hearts of mankind was witnessed to still, 
even in their religion, by many legends 
wherein the literal sun was fabled to play 
the part of the Sun of Righteousness. 

A greater condemnation of idolatry, and a 
grander revelation of the true God as the 
only omnipotent one worthy of worship, 
could not be conceived of by the human 
mind. Yet God in mercy condescended thus 
to speak the truth to the ancient nations, 
not to the Egyptians only, for the knowl- 
edge of Israel and of their wonderful deliver- 
ance by the power of their God spread 
through all the land till the fear of them 



THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT. 195 

and the dread of them fell upon all people. 
Notwithstanding this wonderful revelation 
of God's power, and of the fact that the 
supreme God does care for his children, so 
that there is no excuse for the worship of 
demi-gods, it might be said of the Egyptians, 
that ' ' they repented not to give him glory. ' ' 

Still there were some w T ho did repent, for 
a mixed multitude of the Egyptians chose 
the part of the Israelites, and went up with 
them. What wonder that when delivered 
thus with such mighty power, and brought 
through the Red Sea on dry land, — what 
wonder that they sang a new song, a song 
of triumph, saying : "I will sing unto the 
Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously. 
. . . The Lord is my strength and song, 
and he is become my salvation. ' ' 

He w T ho beholds these plagues in the true 
light, will see in them no conflict with the 
great truth that God is love ; instead, he 
will see revealed therein a love that broods 
over us ever, though in trial and darkness, 
though in slavery and oppression; a love 
that, w T hile seeking to bring us to freedom and 
joy in him, yea, even to the land of rest that 
floweth with milk and honey, seeks also so to 
reveal himself to all others that they too, 
through our deliverance, may find him their 
deliverer and their supreme joy. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 



THE SEVEN LAST PLAGUES. 



" He will plead with all flesh ; he will give them that are wicked 
to the sword. "'— Jer. 25 :31. 

Those who have read carefully the pre- 
ceding chapters will have discovered that the 
one thought which the author has endeavored 
to make prominent, is that whether in the 
refreshing dew and gently falling rain, or in 
storm and tempest; whether in the loving 
ministration of Jesus, or in the destruction 
of the world by a flood of waters, — whatever 
the action may be, the motive of God is love, 
for God is love. 

The seven last plagues may appear to be 
an exception to this rule. To those who re- 
gard the closing of probation as an arbitrary 
act on the part of God, a willful shutting off 
of mercy because the set time for mercy is 
past, and who believe that the plagues are 
poured out after such closing of probation, 
this manifestation of wrath on the part of 
God must ever remain the great exception, 
the one act of God utterly unreconciled and 
unreconcilable with a motive of love. It is 

[196] 



THE SEVEN LAST PLAGUES. 197 

as though God said, "I will have mercy and 
accept repentance for a certain length of 
time, and after that I will not have mercy 
nor accept repentance. Moreover, after that 
time is past, and therefore after the sinner's 
case is hopeless and no experience of suffer- 
ing can benefit him, then I will glut my rage 
and revenge and pour out all my vials of 
torture upon his defense] ess head." This is 
the pagan conception of God, — a being w r ho 
is capable of all the passions of men, only 
greater and more terrible in his anger and 
revenge. God is the same yesterday, today, 
and forever. If this is his character when 
pouring out the plagues, it has ever been his 
character; Satan's representation of God has 
been the just one ; and the pagan sacrifice of 
some innocent victim to propitiate the ever 
easily offended Deity was necessary, — in 
short, paganism is true. 

How different the God revealed in Jesus 
Christ! — infinite and eternal in his mercy and 
love, taking no pleasure in the necessary 
death of the wicked, but ever, with every ex- 
perience of both joy and sorrow r , seeking to 
lead them through repentance to life. How 
different the closing of probation, when it is 
understood to be man's finally forsaking God, 
instead of God's forsaking man ! How dif- 
ferent the closing of the doors of the heav- 
enly temple by sorrowing angels, who weep 
that the last sinner has finally refused re- 



198 GOD IS LOVE. 

pentance, from the shutting of those doors 
by an angry Deity, perhaps in the very face 
of those who may chance to be late ! 

It has been thought that the seven last 
plagues will be the result of the closing of 
Christ's intercession, so that nothing will in- 
tervene between the w T rath of an offended 
God and the defenseless head of doomed man. 
This idea, when carried to this extreme, ut- 
terly separates between the Father and the 
Son; it denies the great truth so often as- 
serted by Jesus, that he and his Father are 
one ; that he is but the revelation, or mani- 
festation, of the Father; that, as the poet 
says,— 

" The love that Jesus gave 

Was still the Father's own ; 
Nor jealous claim of rivalry 
Divides the cross and throne." 

It is admitted by all that this wrath mani- 
fested in the plagues is ' ' unmixed ; ' ' the wine 
is undiluted with water. But the wrath of 
God is revealed through Jesus to be his 
wrath against sin, because sin is the enemy 
of the sinner. It is, therefore, only another 
manifestation of his love. God can have no 
sympathy for sin, for to do so would put him 
into partnership with Satan, the enemy of all 
joy. But God does have infinite sympathy, or 
rather pity, for the sinner. This last mani- 
festation of wrath must be unmixed, undi- 
luted ; that is, it must reveal to the world 



THE SEVEN LAST PLAGUES. 199 

and the universe just hoiv God hates sin, even 
a sin that the world has thought would pass 
unnoticed by him ; nevertheless, the motive 
of God back of this wrath against sin may 
be, and is, infinite love to all his creatures. 

A good father punishes his child for doing 
wrong, not only for the benefit of the child, 
but also for the benefit of the whole family. 
The punishment reveals his unmixed hatred 
for the action, not for the child himself. 
The restraining force of the lesson of that 
punishment upon the child and upon the 
family is just in proportion to the realization 
by the children of this fact. If they see that 
the father punishes in love, and for their 
good, and that the punishment grieves his 
tender heart more than theirs, they learn 
thereby to hate the evil act, and to love the 
tender parent. If the parent punishes in 
anger, they see thereby that he is no better 
than themselves, and their hearts cling to the 
sin, and learn to hate the one who punishes. 
This is why "our Father" has told us that 
he takes pleasure, not in the punishment, but 
in the repentance. 

Now, the seven last plagues are a punish- 
ment of the All-Father upon his rebellious 
children. They are sent either in anger or 
in love, and their effect upon the universe of 
intelligent beings, and the effect of the belief 
in them upon our hearts now, will, as re- 
vealed in the above illustration, be in accord 



200 GOD IS LOVE. 

with our understanding of them. They may 
be to us a revelation of a God who, like 
ourselves, is capable of anger, hatred, and 
revenge, and therefore cannot reasonably 
condemn such passions in us ; or they may 
become to us a revelation of a God of infinite 
love, w T ho hates sin with an infinite hatred 
because it is the enemy of those he loves. 

Almost the whole typology of the Bible de- 
pends upon, the fact that the leading of the 
children of Israel out of Egypt, across the 
Red Sea, and into the land of Canaan, is a 
type of the leading of the true Israel out of 
the darkness of this world into the true 
Canaan of .rest. The force of this type is 
recognized in the book of Revelation, where 
the redeemed on the sea of glass are repre- 
sented as singing the song of Moses and the 
Lamb. The two songs are one; one is the 
type of the other. The children of Israel 
were delivered by a series of plagues through 
which God revealed himself to the Egyptians, 
and also revealed his hatred of the sin of 
idolatry. Those plagues were not sent to de- 
stroy the Egyptians meaninglessly, through a 
motive of wrath, but to reveal God to them, 
giving them one more, one last, chance to go 
with his people; and all this through the 
motive of love. God is to set his hand a 
second time to the deliverance of Israel. He 
will make a final revelation to the world of 
himself and of his hatred of sin. 



THE SEVEN LAST PLAGUES. 201 

John says, "I looked, and, behold, the tem- 
ple of the tabernacle of the testimony in 
heaven was opened : and the seven angels 
came out of the temple, having the seven 
plagues, . . . and the temple was filled with 
smoke from the glory of God, and from his power; 
and no man was able to enter into the temple, 

TILL THE SEVEN PLAGUES OF THE SEVEN 

angels were fulfilled. " In these words, 
the Lord definitely informs us just how the 
plagues stand related, in point of time, to the 
closing work in the heavenly sanctuary, and 
therefore to the closing of probation. This 
is the antitype ; to understand it we must go 
back to the type. 

When was the time, and the only time in 
the yearly round of the earthly ministration, 
when the temple was filled with smoke, and 
no man permitted to enter ? Was it after the 
ministration was completed, and probation as 
typified by that year's ministration at an 
end ? or was it during the closing moments 
of that ministration, while the high priest 
was in the most holy place ? We answer, 
The last is the truth. The tenth day of the 
seventh month was the day of atonement. 
The high priest, however, did not really enter 
the most holy place to make the final atone- 
ment until the closing minutes of that day, 
just before sunset. During the day the as- 
sistant priests were in the temple, but when 
the climax was reached, the high priest went 



202 GOD IS LOVE. 

into the holy of holies alone ; all other priests 
retired even from the outer apartment of the 
temple, the temple was filled with smoke, and 
no one was permitted to enter till the minis- 
tration was completed. (See Lev. 16:13, 17; 
also elsewhere.) This is the type, and Rev. 
15:8 is the antitype. 

Since the termination of the prophetic 
periods, in 1844, we have been in the day of 
atonement, but the assistant priests have 
been in the temple above, and the ministra- 
tion has been going on in the outer apart- 
ment as well. When the hour of the atone- 
ment arrives, all will retire, Jesus will enter 
the holy of holies alone, and at that time, 
not after he comes out and the door is 
shut, will the plagues be poured out. 

With this statement, every text in the 
Scriptures that relates at all to the closing 
of probation is in perfect agreement, while 
they are all in direct antagonism to the idea 
that probation closes before the plagues be- 
gin to fall. It must be remembered, however, 
that when we speak of the closing of pro- 
bation, we mean, not the closing of probation 
for some individuals, but the complete closing 
of probation for the world. This distinction 
is all-important, for we have seen that the 
marking and sealing work, or the closing of 
probation, is progressive, and covers a period 
of time. The plagues fall upon those who 
have the mark of the beast, that is, upon 



THE SEVEN LAST PLAGUES. 203 

those persons whose probation is closed, because 
they have fully committed themselves to the 
powers of evil. 

But while they fall upon individuals whose 
probation is closed, they fall before the pro- 
bation of all the world is closed, that is, 
before all have taken the final step -that com- 
mits them wholly to evil. They fall for the 
purpose of so revealing God's truth and his 
wrath against sin, as to help those who are 
deciding, to decide aright. 

Satan, the Bible says, will be w r orking with 
all power and signs, and lying wonders, and 
with all deceivableness of unrighteousness, 
so that, if it were possible, he would deceive 
the very elect. Under these circumstances, 
if God wrought only with the silent power of 
the truth, some honest souls, whose intellects 
have not been trained to quickly recognize 
and appreciate the truth, might be deceived. 
God will not permit this. He will set his 
hand a second time to deliver his people. 
Re will manifest himself openly and mightily, 
as of old. 

The Son of God, the divine Word, will be 
in the temple during the plagues, for after 
the pouring out of the seventh vial his 
voice is heard out of the temple from the throne, 
that is, from the inner apartment of the 
heavenly sanctuary, saying "It is done." 1 

After the sixth plague is poured out, this 
solemn warning is given, "Behold, I come 



204 GOD IS LOVE. 

as a thief. ^Blessed is he that watcheth, and 
keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and 
they see his shame. " All will admit that this 
is speaking of the garments of divine right- 
eousness, with which the redeemed will be 
clothed. 

Then there is danger that this garment 
may be lost at that time, else why this 
solemn warning ? But if the garment of 
righteousness can be lost after six plagues 
have been poured out, then it can also be 
gained ; for at the same time that the Lord 
says, "He that is righteous, let him be right- 
eous still," he says also, "He that is filthy, 
let him be filthy still." Therefore probation is 
not closed after the sixth plague is poured out. 

"And he gathereth them into a place called 
in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. ' ' 2 It is 
under this plague that the wicked are gath- 
ered for the great battle. Joel describes this 
same gathering thus: "Assemble yourselves, 
and come, all ye heathen, and gather your- 
selves together round about : thither cause 
thy mighty ones to come down, O Lord. 
Let the heathen be w T akened, and come up to 
the valley of Jehoshaphat : for there will I 
sit to judge all the heathen round about. 
Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe : 
come, get you down; for the press is full, 
the fats overflow ; for their wickedness is 
great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of 
decision : for the day of the Lord is near in 



THE SEVEN LAST PLAGUES. 205 

the valley of decision. ' ' Here it is seen that 
when they are gathered here, under the sixth 
plague, instead of their cases all having been 
decided long before, they are right now in 
the valley of decision, where they must make 
their choice at once. How appropriate, then, 
the warning to watch, lest the heavenly gar- 
ment be lost. 

The prophet Zephaniah, speaking of this 
gathering of the wicked who are without 
shame, or, as one translator puts it, without 
desire of repentance, says: " Gather your- 
selves together, yea, gather together, O 
nation not desired ; before the decree bring forth, 
before the day pass as the chaff, before the fierce 
anger of the Lord come upon you, before the 
day of the Lord's anger come upon you." 
Then he speaks of the righteous with an ad- 
monition much like that in Revelation about 
the garments of righteousness: "Seek ye 
the Lord, all ye meek of the earth, which 
have wrought his judgment; seek righteous- 
ness, seek meekness : it may be ye shall be 
hid in the day of the Lord's anger." Here 
this gathering, which is under the sixth 
plague, is plainly declared to be before the de- 
cree bring forth, before the day pass as the chaff, 
as it is before the fierce anger of the Lord 
against sin, which under the seventh plague 
destroys the unrepentant sinner from the earth. 

The drying up of the river Euphrates un- 
der the sixth plague is the coming to his end 



206 GOD IS LOVE. 

of the Turkish power as described by the 
prophet Daniel in the last verse of the elev- 
enth chapter. But it is at that time that 
Michael, or Christ, shall " stand up," or lay 
aside his priestly garments, and take his 
kingly robe; and then will come the climax 
of the time of trouble under the seventh 
plague, which is the one universal plague, 
and the one which sums up in itself all the 
others. 3 

How perfectly this agrees with the prophet 
John's picture in Revelation, where, after the 
destruction of the Turkish power under the 
sixth plague, the Son of God is represented 
under the seventh plague as stepping forth 
from the temple, saying, "It is done," while 
there are lightnings, and thunderings, and an 
earthquake, and great hail, and the fierceness 
of divine wrath against sin, destroying the 
world. 

Again and again the prophets speak of the 
Lord in these plagues as "pleading with all 
flesh" and giving them that are wicked to the 
sword.* This reveals God's motive, not to 
needlessly torture those who are past hope, 
but so to reveal his truth and manifest his 
wrath against sin, as to help those who are 
still in the valley of decision to decide 
aright. 

As it was in Egypt, so here, there will be 
just two classes. The little, despised com- 
pany will be looking for Jesus to come and 



THE SEVEN LAST PLAGUES. 207 

set up his kingdom. All others, led away by 
the great delusion, will be looking for that 
kingdom to come in some way through the 
gateway of politics. The whole world will 
be looking for a theocracy. Satan will be 
working in mighty power, showing miracles, 
so that, if possible, he may deceive the very 
elect. God's truth will have been proclaimed 
to the world with power, yet if God showed 
no outward manifestation of power to offset 
Satan's miracles, some might be honestly de- 
ceived. 

As in the deliverance of ancient Israel, 
every plague drew the line between the 
proud and haughty Egyptians and their false 
system of idolatry on the one hand, and the 
despised slaves, who were worshipers of the 
true God, on the other, showing that the God 
of gods was with the despised few ; so here, 
the noisome sore may fall upon those who 
have the mark of the beast, but no plague 
shall come nigh the dwelling of those who 
have made God their refuge, and his truth 
their shield and buckler. 

The multitudes who are looking for the 
false christ and accepting the false theocracy 
may have blood to drink ; but of that little 
company it is said, " Bread shall be given 
him; his water shall be sure." The sun may 
scorch its worshipers with great heat, but 
"he that dwelleth in the secret place of the 
Most High shall. abide under the shadoiv of the 



208 GOD IS LOVE. 

Almighty." Again and again, when a plague 
is poured out, it is said of the wicked world, 
"They repented not to give him glory;" 
"They repented not of their deeds." This 
plainly show r s that the time for repentance 
was not arbitrarily closed. It shows that the 
plagues were given by a merciful, loving 
Father, to lead men to repentance ; but they, 
hardened by sin, would not heed the lesson. 

The Egyptians did not repent, but went on 
to destruction in the Red Sea. Yet some of 
them repented. A mixed multitude went up 
with Israel to the promised land. So here 
God may have some fruit of his loving labor; 
some may repent, but of the world it is true, 
"They repented not." Nevertheless, not un- 
til the seventh plague is poured out and 
there are voices and thunders and lightnings 
and a great earthquake, — not until then is 
Christ's voice heard saying, "It is done." 

What is done ? The plan of redemption 
will not be complete for more than a thou- 
sand years yet. Oh, this is God saying in 
infinite mercy, and grief of w T ounded love, as 
Jesus spake when he wept over Jerusalem, 
and pronounced its doom, — it is God saying, 
"I have done my last and utmost for the 
human soul. I sent prophet after prophet, 
and some they stoned, and some they put to 
death. I sent my only Son, but him they 
slew. From the very seat of infinite mercy, — 
from out the door of the still open temple, I 



THE SEVEN LAST PLAGUES. 209 

sent these seven angels to reveal my unmixed 
hatred and wrath against sin, that men might 
take final warning, and turn to 'me; but they 
would not. I have done my last and utmost, 
and still they repent not. It is clone. He 
that is filthy will be filthy still, and he that 
is righteous will be righteous still. ' ' 

Then the Saviour comes out, and the tem- 
ple is closed, for there will be no more ap- 
plications for mercy. In a little while he 
puts on his kingly robes, and comes to take 
his own eternally to himself, and with the 
knife of love to cut out forever from the uni- 
verse the cancer of sin, that righteousness 
and joy may reign supreme forever. O, this 
is a lesson to all God's creatures, of his 
hatred for sin, and also of his love for sin- 
ners. This is love, for "God is love." 



14 



CHAPTER XXIV. 



THE SECOND RESURRECTION. 



"Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am God.' — Isa. 43 :12. 

The plagues, in which is to be poured out 
God's unmixed wrath against sin, still come 
from a heart filled with, pitying love for the 
sinner. God takes no pleasure in the misery 
of the wicked, but only longs for them to 
turn and repent. It is only after the last 
plague is poured out, and they still remain 
impenitent, that he is compelled to say, "It 
is done;" "he that is filthy, let him be filthy 
still." This is but an announcement of the 
fact that the last impenitent soul has sinned 
beyond repentance, and therefore beyond par- 
don. 

By this it is not meant that the probation 
of no one closes until that time. The proba- 
tion of many has doubtless closed already, 
and it is probable that the probation of a 
large majority of the wicked will close be- 
fore the plagues are poured out. It should 
be remembered that the sealing of the wicked 
for Satan, as the sealing of the righteous for 
God, is an individual work, and a progressive 

[210] 



THE SECOND RESURRECTION. 211 

work. It is not the turning away of God 
from the soul, but the hardening of the soul 
against God. The sealing, or marking, is 
complete, and therefore probation ends for 
the individual when that heart becomes so 
hardened in sin as to turn away from God's 
loving power as revealed in his everlasting 
gospel, and pronounce it all the work of 
Satan. It is doubtless true that some have 
gone thus far already. It is certain that as 
the truth goes with power, many will con- 
tinue to resist and reject it. 

The probation of the world, as a world, 
however, is only closed when the last sinner 
has taken this stand, and God has solemnly 
announced the fact in the awful, "It is 
done ; " "he that is filthy, let him be filthy 
still. ' ' Not until this time is the world given 
over by God's lingering love; and to the 
writer it seems absolutely positive from the 
Bible that this is not before the pouring out 
of the plagues, but just after the seventh 
plague is poured out. This being so, the 
plagues are not an illustration of a wrath 
that delights in hopeless and useless torture, 
but of a love that lingers long in its sublime 
and godlike effort to* turn the sinner into the 
right way. It is true the plagues reveal 
God's unmingled wrath to the universe, but 
it is unmingled wrath and hatred for sin, be- 
cause of unmingled, pitying love for the sin- 
ner whom the sin is destroying. This is the 



212 GOD IS LOVE. 

God whom Jesus revealed in his whole life, — 
a God w T ho hates the sin because he loves 
the sinner. This is the God who is one with 
that Saviour in all the love he manifested on 
this earth, and who is, with him, the same 
yesterday, today, and forever. He it is with 
whom there is no past and no future, for he 
inhabiteth eternity, — he, the all- unchanging, 
the all-embracing, the all-satisfying Love. 

But it will be asked, If this is God, if he 
has no desire to torture or to punish for the 
sake of the punishment itself, why are the 
wicked resurrected to suffer the second 
death ? Why, when once in their graves, 
are they not left there forever? To the 
thoughtful mind that has carefully considered 
all the points of the preceding chapters, this 
is not a difficult question. It is true, how- 
ever, that the greatest truth lies closest to 
the most dangerous error, even as the most 
ravishing harmony is that which lies nearest 
to discord. For this reason, many are too 
timid to think to the line and get the truth. 
To do this requires the courage that comes 
from a consciousness of divine guidance, — a 
simple faith that the Spirit, if trusted, will 
lead into all truth. 

Now, the most dangerous error is to trust 
to a future probation. To do this is to pro- 
crastinate without excuse, since God closes 
this probationary period w T ith the positive an- 
nouncement that the filthy will be filthy still. 



THE SECOND RESURRECTION. 213 

But why will there be no future proba- 
tion ? — Not because God is not good enough 
to continue man's probation indefinitely, if 
there would be any use in such a continua- 
tion; but because God ha,s done his utmost 
here in infinite love to turn the soul to him, 
and the soul that has resisted it here, and 
even pronounced the work wrought by the 
power of that love but the w T ork of Satan, — 
God knows that soul would resist it ever and 
always. 

I say that God knows this, but it must also 
be revealed to the w r orld, and to the universe, 
so that they may see and know ; else they 
cannot, at the destruction of the wicked, of 
their own free will, join in the spontaneous 
song of universal praise, ascribing to him 
justice and truth in all his ways. That the 
universe of intelligent beings may see this, 
and so be prepared to join in that song, thus 
being united in love to God as one family in 
heaven and in earth, and so preventing all 
danger of future sin, — this is the meaning of 
the second resurrection. 

The belief in a future probation, w r hich is 
becoming so prevalent today, rests upon a 
trite idea of the character of God; but also 
upon a false idea of the effect of sin upon the 
human heart, and therefore a false idea of 
the nature of the closing of probation. One 
of the premises is true, the other is false ; 
hence, according to the law of syllogisms, 



214 GOD IS LOVE. 

the conclusion, which is that there must be 
a future probation, is false also. The reason 
given is that God is too good ever to cut off 
the truly repenting soul from the privilege of 
pardon and peace. This is emphatically true, 
but it does not follow, as believers in this 
theory think, that there w T ill be a future pro- 
bation. And why not ? — Simply because ( and 
this is what they do not see), if God is so 
good, sin is so bad that, persisted in, it 
hardens the soul beyond the power of re- 
pentance, yea, beyond the reach of the Holy 
Spirit to lead it to repentance. And this 
point is reached before probation is closed 
here; hence there is absolutely no use in a 
future probation, as no one would improve it 
to repent. Not only is it true that there is 
no use in a future probation, but there is ab- 
solutely no possibility of such probation. If 
God had arbitrarily cut off probation here, he 
could, and being a loving Father, he would 
have given man another chance. But God has 
cut off no one. Man has rejected God. God 
could not, therefore, give another probation 
without interfering with the free will of man, 
thus destroying character. 

How does God propose to reveal this great 
fact to the universe, so that in all the future, 
after the wicked are destroyed and redemp- 
tion is complete, there will never be one in- 
telligent being who will ever be tempted 
even to think that if probation had continued 



THE SECOND RESURRECTION. 215 

a little longer, or God had done a little more, 
others might have been led to repentance ? 
Ah ! this is how : All those who have died 
will be raised from their graves. Among 
the mighty hosts of the resurrected wicked 
there w T ill be many who died suddenly. Not 
realizing the watchfulness of a Providence 
without whom not a sparrow falleth, far less 
any human soul, till the Father sees he has 
made his final choice, we might say of 
this one or that, "If he had had a little 
longer time, he would have repented. " So 
now here he is, alive again, and the Father's 
mercy and love are still the same. — "from 
everlasting to everlasting. ' It may be said 
that probation is at an end, and this is 
true ; but here will be revealed the fact that 
God never closed the probation of any man; 
the man closed it himself by rejecting God. 
If probation is at an end, it is not that God 
is changed, — not that he is less ready to re- 
ceive repentance, but that, as he has an- 
nounced, the last man has finally refused to 
give repentance. Here this fact is held up 
before the universe. 

Of all the hosts of the resurrected wicked, 
not one manifests any genuine sorrow for 
sin. The city of the redeemed is there before 
them, in its matchless splendor, revealing the 
love of God that they have slighted. The 
outlying camp of the saints shows beforehand 
a sample of the redeemed world, from which 



216 GOD IS LOVE. 

every trace of sin is removed. All this holds 
out, in vivid contrast to their miserable con- 
dition, all that God in love has longed to do 
for them, and yet there is no true repent- 
ance. They see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob 
in the kingdom of God, and they themselves 
shut out, not by any arbitrary decree of God, 
but by their own refusal to enter by the ap- 
pointed way. Before the universe they prove 
themselves to be indeed thieves and robbers, 
by seeking to climb up some other way. If 
they long for the external glories of the city 
of the redeemed, they do not long for the inter- 
nal glories of the Christly life, of which these 
external glories are but a result and a reflec- 
tion, and without w T hich they are impossible. 
They are maddened by the sight of the glory 
and joy of which they themselves are incapable. 
Every one of the mighty multitude joins 
hands with the prince of darkness, and takes 
up arms against the kingdom of everlasting 
love. Here, as on the cross of Calvary, is 
revealed the fact that persistent sin, in the 
heart of every sinner, would never be satis- 
fied till it dethroned God and reigned in his 
stead. Untouched and untendered by that 
life and death of love, sin is the same here 
as when it mocked at the foot of the cross. 
If the fire comes down and destroys the 
wicked, it is only when every intelligent be- 
ing in the universe can see that this is the 
only way that the government of love, which 



THE SECOND RESURRECTION. 217 

only makes joy possible, can be continued 
and perpetuated. 

Every sinner that is destroyed is taken 
with the weapons in his hand with which, 
if possible, he would dethrone God and 
murder his children. Satan, leading his 
mighty armies, advances. They go up on 
the breadth of the earth, and encompass the 
camp of the saints about, and the beloved 
city. It is then that fire comes down and 
destroys them. Their final destruction is the 
final deliverance of all the righteous. Is it 
any wonder that the universe, looking on, 
says with one universal song of praise, 
' 'Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord 
God Almighty ; just and true are thy ways, 
thou King of saints " ? Is it any wonder that 
intelligent beings, beholding this mighty con- 
trast of sin and its dark results, with right- 
eousness and its attendant joy, shall learn to 
hate sin and love righteousness, till all dan- 
ger of sin, in all worlds, shall be overpast? 
For, saith the Lord, " Affliction shall not rise 
up a second time. ' ' 

In concluding these chapters, the author 
would express his overpowering sense of the 
weakness and incapacity of the human mind 
to comprehend, and of human language to re- 
veal, the wisdom which is unsearchable, and 
the love which passeth knowledge. There 
are many who are troubled with constant 
doubts of God's love for them, and of their 



218 GOD IS LOVE. 

acceptance with him. They fail to see Love's 
hand in God's dealings with the world, and, 
worse still, they fail to see this hand in his 
dealings with them in their own lives. It 
may be that their path has been over- 
shadowed with darkness, and they have 
walked wearily and despondingly. If to 
some such these words may come as an 
evangel of peace, revealing the great truth 
that God's love is eternal and unchanging, 
rising above and reaching beyond our un- 
worthiness and our sin, — the one unchangeable 
thing in a world of fickleness and change ; 
and if this consciousness may thus come to 
abide with them till they know that he is 
not far from them in any moment of trial 
and need, but that instead he is in them and 
through them and above them all, their refuge 
and strength, — ah, if this consciousness may 
come to them, till they rest quietly and 
trustingly and joyfully in the Everlasting 
Arms, the author will be satisfied, and to 
Christ be all the praise. 



APPENDIX. 



It should be remembered that it is only under the 
seventh plague, or rather, the culmination of all six in 
the seventh, that we are told that " great Babylon 
came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the 
cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath." Rev. 
16 : 19. This is after Christ has left the temple, as de- 
scribed in verse 17. It could not have taken place be- 
fore; for this unmixed wrath sweeps the wicked from the 
earth, and it is not in God's character to destroy a man 
while there is a possible chance that he will repent. At 
the time of the pouring out of this fierceness of his 
wrath, the message has been given, and Christ has de- 
clared, " It is done. " 

" When the third angel's message closes, mercy no 
longer pleads for the guilty inhabitants of earth. The 
people of God have accomplished their work. They have 
received 'the latter rain,' 'the refreshing from the 
presence of the Lord, ' and are prepared for the trying 
hour before them. Angels are hastening to and fro in 
heaven. An angel returning from the earth announces 
that his work is done: the final test has been brought up- 
on the world, and all who have proved themselves loyal 
to the divine precepts have received ' the seal of the liv- 
ing God. ' Then Jesus ceases his intercession in the 
sanctuary above. He lifts his hands, and with a loud 
voice says, ' It is done ! ' and all the angelic host lay off 
their crowns as he makes the solemn announcement: 'He 
that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is 
filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let 
him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy 
still.'" — Great Controversy, p. 613. 

Here it is plainly seen that the closing of the third 
message, the closing of the sealing work, and therefore 
the closing of the world's probation, is definitely located 
under the pouring out of the seventh plague, when Christ 
steps out from the temple saying, "It is done. " 

The "It is done" of the seventh plague, and the "He 
that is filthy, let him be filthy still, " are immediately as- 
sociated together. This is also done in "Early Writings," 
chapter entitled, " Third Message Closed, " p. 140, where 
we read as follows: "Then I saw Jesus, who had been 
ministering before the ark containing the ten com- 
mandments, throw down the censer. He raised his hands, 

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220 APPENDIX. 

and with a loud voice said, 'It is done.' And all the 
angelic host laid off their crowns as Jesus made the sol< mn 
declaration, * He that is unjust, let him be unjust still, 
etc. ' " 

It will be seen that this involves all that has been 
presented in this volume concerning the close of probation, 
namely, that while the probation of individuals is closing, 
perhaps even now, all have not made their choice, and 
therefore the world's probation will not close until Jesus, 
in the beginning of the saventh plague, leaves the temple 
saying, " It is done. " 

The expression, " It was impossible for the plagues to 
be poured out while Jesus officiated in the sanctuary. " 
which closely follows the last quotation in i( Early 
Writings," must be understood to mean the plagues in 
their fullness, culminating in the seventh. Understood 
in any other way, it is a contradiction of the preceding 
quotations, as well as of the plain testimony of Scripture; 
but understood thus, all is harmony, It was thus that 
Daniel said, " I was astonished at the vision, but none 
understood it," yet all but one symbol had been explained 
and understood. 

This climax of the plagues under the seventh is plainly 
declared to occur after the angel with the seal returns 
from earth to heaven, announcing that his work is done. 
("Great Controversy," p. 613. ) 

But the six men, or six angels, with slaughter weapons 
in their hands, were to follow the man with the writer's 
inkhorn, or the angel with the seal, and strike those upon 
whom he did not set his seal, as he proceeded with his 
work. (SeeEze. 9; also Testimony No. 31, p. 203-209.) 
Thus we see that while the six men, or six angels, do not 
strike a single person until the angel with the seal has 
passed him by, or until he is marked for the beast, they 
do begin their work before all are marked, or sealed, and 
therefore before the world's probation is closed. We are 
told plainly that "already a few drops of God's wrath 
have fallen upon the earth; but when the seven last 
plagues shall be poured out without mixture into 
the cup of his indignation, " that is, all of them, poured 
out in their fullness, "then it will be forever too late to 
repent and find shelter." (Testimony No. 31, p. 208.) 

The few drops of God's wrath already manifest in 
pestilence, and cyclone, and earthquake, are to go on 
warning men and seeking to turn them into the right 
way, until six plagues have fallen upon those who have the 
mark; but when all have made their choice, and been 
marked, or sealed, then Jesus steps from the temple, say- 



APPENDIX. 221 

ing, "It is done, " and then all six plagues combine and 
culminate in the seventh, sweeping the hopelessly wicked 
from the earth. This idea shows perfect harmony be- 
tween the Bible and the testimony of the Spirit, while 
any other view presents a conflict not only between the 
testimonies and the Bible, but also between the differ- 
ent quotations in the testimonies themselves. 

While the plagues of Egypt, in their ending, extermi- 
nated the Egyptian hosts in the Ked Sea, in their begin- 
ning they so proclaimed the gospel that all the world 
heard and trembled, as we are told, " The plagues upon 
Egypt, when God was about to deliver Israel, were similar 
in character to those more terrible and extensive judg- 
ments which are to fa]l upon the world just before the 
final deliverance of God's people." — Great Contro- 
versy, p. 627. 

The six plagues will so draw the line and so reveal on 
which side of the controversy God is, as to leave all with- 
out excuse. The proclamation of the gospel in this 
world is to close with a power and magnificence of which 
few of us have even dreamed. 



REFERENCES TO THE SCRIPTURES. 



CHAPTER I i John 17:3. 

2 Col. 2:3. 

3 Ps. 139:1, 2. 

* Job. 42:2. 
5 Ps. 19:1-3. 

CHAPTER III 1 1 John 4:20. 

2 Phil. 2 : 5-7. 

CHAPTER IV i Acts 17:27, 28. 

2 Isa. 53:4. 

CHAPTER V * Rev. 4:11. 

2 Col. 3 : 10. 

3 Matt. 7:11. 

CHAPTER VI » Heb. 1:2. 

2 John 1:3. 10. 

3 Acts 17:26. 

* Isa. 9 : 6. 

5 Col. 1:12-19. 

6 Eph. 3 : 14-19. 

CHAPTER VIII ! James 1 : 16, 17. 

CHAPTER XII i Prov. 1:29-33. 

CHAPTER XV i Rom. 8:3, 4. 

CHAPTER XVI * Rom. 3:31. 

2 Rom. 3:26. 

3 Acts 5:31. 

CHAPTER XVII 1 Ps. 37 : 10. 

2 Obadiah 16. 

CHAPTER XVIII 1 Gen. 3:16. 

2 Isa. 54:7, 8. 

CHAPTER XXIII » Rev. 16:17. 

2 Rev. 16:16. 

3 Dan. 11:45; 12:1. 

4 Je*. 25:31; Isa 66:16. 

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